Adedapo Adeniyi is a promising 20 yo abstract SF author from Ilorin, Nigeria.

Disclaimer: you should read The Dilemma of the He and His House, House? then Mosquito Farm before reading the interview.

Which Nigerian city do you live in? Can you describe it for us?

I live in Ilorin, it's in Kwara State. I think Ilorin is great, I've lived here all my life, it's claustrophobic and surreal, simultaneously very big and very small, like it's breathing, there's also an eerie air here that a lot of the artists that live here can attest to. My favorite part about it is that we're in what I like to call Ilorin's renaissance era, where the youth are becoming more sensitized to art and exploring themselves in relations to the emotions and mindspace of the city.

In your Abstractism Manifesto, you mention God multiple times. What is God, from your perspective, and what role does He play in your life?

(note from SFSS: Abstractism is a term coined by Adedapo, defining it as a genre/philosophy that functions as an amalgamation of solipsism, surrealism, psychedelia, psychology and the subjectivity of reality; he proposes the dissolution of form into true abstracts.)

I like to think of God in many ways, of course as the ultimate entity, divine, the creator of all, and also as an expression of our true selves.

I grew up Christian, I'm still Christian. I have a very different relationship with God now where I'm constantly asking who He is in me, and not just who. He is like I'm trying to study Him.

Gemini's synopsis of The Dilemma: This is a story about a man who is confused about his identity. It discusses his house and its origins. The man tells others the story of the house, but he cannot remember it. He eventually realizes that he is the house.

In your story The Dilemma of the He and His House, House?, that we'll call The Dilemma for brevity purpose, you write at one point: “I will stop trying to encompass it in words. It is the truth”. What do you mean by that?

I like to think that there are certain symbols or aspects of my work that can't be expressed through familiar language, because there are no words to use to describe them, they're otherworldly, true, void of the taints of this reality.

What does “void of the taints of this reality” mean?

A psychedelic trip, an orgasm, a feeling of being possessed by the Holy Spirit. There's a lot of ways you could try explaining how they feel, but the language we know doesn't have all the words to express these feelings, these experiences. They're religious.

In The Dilemma, the hero is being told: “You are closed to the knowing, you should open yourself”. Is this a reference to the word Ephphatha in Mark's Gospel? Can you explain what this means to you?

(Note from SFSS: Ephphatha, which means open yourself, was said by Jesus to a deaf-mute man in the book of Mark)

Huh, I had no idea what that meant, I just googled it, funny how these things work. When the main character, The He, is told that phrase, it's because he's still in doubt that he's the God figure in the story, and for him to realize that, he has to kill the doubt and start thinking in maybes and what ifs.

It's solipsism logic, open yourself to the knowing that all exists because of you and it becomes so, close yourself to it and you remain oblivious all your life.

Adedapo's synopsis of Mosquito Farm: Mosquito Farm is a story set in futurist Nigeria about Jomi, an enforcer who after making a grave decision, descends into insanity and faces the conflict of the fact that he's been living a lie.

Mosquito Farm reminds me of Philip K. Dick stories. He's an influence of yours, right?

Yes, PKD is my favorite writer, I love how he revolutionalized paranoid fiction and the idea of subjective reality in science fiction, so Mosquito Farm is in a sense a product of that, but with Nigerian sensibilities.

Funny how you mention “air addicts” in Mosquito Farm. I always thought that my addiction to oxygen was healthy

I'd say it's healthy right now, but when we consider pollution and the amount of toxins we're exposed to every day, it isn't far off to say that the air we're breathing casually now can in decades become toxic and hallucinogenic.

I think it's my duty as a sci-fi writer to consider worst case scenarios in the future over best cases.

At the beginning of the story, two characters have a simultaneous thought. This happened to two friends of mine (one of them was my best friend and died last year)

Oh I'm so sorry to hear that.

The idea of simultaneously having a thought with another person came from my belief that us humans are evolving towards telepathy, it's happened multiple times to me with people very close to me.

Of course, the root of the thought they're sharing is revealed at the end of the story as a shared obsession amongst people in Eko Futura.

Your description of people addicted to air and hallucinating reminded me of people I know who suffered from mental illness as a result of Covid lockdowns

The story definitely grew from my perception of a post pandemic world and how it affected consciousness.

With us being in lockdown for almost a year, it affected our mental health, and that was us not interacting with infected air, I flipped that and made the insanity air borne.

At one point of the story, one of the characters say: “Thank God for Western medicine”. I don't know how Western medicine is perceived in Nigeria, but in the west there is for sure a growing mistrust for it, especially since the Covid vaccines

There's a growing mistrust for it here as well, but the idea of the story was that the people in Eko Futura have a complex against the infected people living outside the utopia, and when they say “thank God for Western medicine,” they're thanking God for its accessibility to them.

At another point of the story, someone has to decide whether he should kill a child or not. I know an Irak veteran (not the vet I interviewed here, someone else) who had to do it, he got PTSD

Oh yeah, the blueprint of the story is this fast-paced PTSD, where what he's done starts to haunt him as soon as he does it, just because he's never been confronted with something as grotesque as killing a child before.

In your story, a character makes a prayer. Here is how I pray: I talk to God spontaneously, and it helps me clarifying what I'm living/doing

That's kind of what he does too, he asks God for clarity.

At the end of the story, the hero has to make a tough choice. I think he'll make the right one

I guess we'll never know.

I have trouble understanding abstracts, that's why I didn't really understand The Dilemma. I understood Mosquito Farm, though, because it's much more concrete

Mosquito Farm is definitely more accessible, but The Dilemma was the first story I wrote after the manifesto and it perfectly encapsulates abstractism ; Mosquito Farm leans more towards Africanfuturism and paranoid fiction with abstract sensibilities.

On your X account, your pinned tweet says death to poetry. However, I think that this story is full packed of poetry

I grew up around calculative, systematic poetry, my work is a rejection of that.

What are you currently working on?

Well, I finished my first novel a couple months ago. I'm currently doing research for my next one and learning how to make short films and experimenting with visual language.

Where can we buy your novel?

It's not out yet, sadly.

A lot of my readers are atheists. What would you say to them?

I don't think anybody's really an atheist, I think we all have a strong connection to some entity, albeit ambiguous, but yeah I think I'd ask them what they think is out there, or who.

If you had one Nigerian tune to share, what would it be?

You're very gifted, please keep practicing, one day you'll be famous, maybe

Thank you for this. I really believe it too. I want to reinvent literature and cinema as a Nigerian, always been my future.

Thank you for this interview, Adedapo

Thank you as well, Guy.

#adeniyi #shortinterviews

WOLE TALABI is an engineer, writer, and editor from Nigeria. He is the author of the nebula and BSFA award nominated novel SHIGIDI AND THE BRASS HEAD OF OBALUFON (DAW books/Gollancz) one of the Washington Posts Top 10 Science fiction and fantasy books of 2023. His short fiction has appeared in places like Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, Africa Risen and is collected in the books CONVERGENCE PROBLEMS (DAW books, 2024) and INCOMPLETE SOLUTIONS (Luna Press, 2019). He has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, BSFA and Locus awards, as well as the Caine Prize for African Writing. He has won the Nommo award for African speculative fiction and the Sidewise award for Alternate History. He has edited five anthologies including the acclaimed AFRICANFUTURISM: AN ANTHOLOGY (Brittlepaper, 2020) and MOTHERSOUND: THE SAUÚTIVERSE ANTHOLOGY (Android Press, 2023). He likes scuba diving, elegant equations, and oddly shaped things. He currently lives and works in Australia. Find him at wtalabi.wordpress.com and at @wtalabi on Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky and Tiktok.

1) According to you and apart from the number of words, what is the main difference between a short story and a novel?

I think a short story is primarily asking one question or exploring one idea or illustrating one theme and as such it has just enough of what it needs (character, plot, etc.) to execute that effectively. A novel may have multiple ideas or questions or concepts, or even if it has on one main one, it will typically have others that it touches on, in service of that larger, main idea of theme and it carries as much as it needs to explore them fully.

2) What's your favorite short story?

The impossible question. There are far too many to list. So instead I'll just mention three stories I love. The ones that come to mind first right now. Those would be Exhalation by Ted Chiang, Spider The Artist by Nnedi Okorafor, and A Walk In The Sun by Geoffrey Landis.

3) What's your favorite short story written by you?

The second impossible question. This is like asking a parent to choose a favorite child. So instead I'll change the question to one that's different but has the same spirit. Which 3 of my short stories do I feel illustrate my writing the most? I'd say:

1. When We Dream We Are Our God
2. A Dream Of Electric Mothers
3. The Regression Test

4) How does your African heritage influence your science fiction writing?

Well I grew up in Nigeria which is a fascinating place. The blend of languages, cultures, philosophies, religions, beliefs, economics and so much more all existing side by side is dizzying. And the modern country, especially in large urban centres like Lagos, full of young, eager people, tends to have a chaotic energy that’s hard to describe, something I try to capture in most of my fiction. I am also more specifically ethnically Yoruba and Yoruba culture has an intricate traditional belief system that includes a rich pantheon, complex philosophies and technologies, intricate rituals and so much more. While I grew up urban and Christian, I have always found Yoruba traditional belief and history fascinating and complex, and I try to incorporate as much of it as I can in my work right beside any scientific and technological development, I envision using my engineering interests. Sometimes I build my imagined future technology on a scaffold of Yoruba spiritual beliefs. This is because as much as I consider myself a “logical and scientific minded” person, I grew up in Nigeria where often the physical and spiritual are presented side by side seamlessly with no separation. In addition, I also acknowledge the vastness of what is not yet known in the universe and all the different ways in which people have filled those gaps. It is in the spaces between our knowledge or in the ambiguity of our perceptions that I try to fit the spiritual elements of my stories. Humans have had magical and spiritual beliefs since we formed societies and I believe we will continue to do so, therefore the blending of both seems natural to me, even when speculating about the future. So readers shouldn't be surprised to find some almost mystic-leaning elements in my science fiction, even in my so called “hard-SF” stories.

5) What themes or issues specific to Africa do you explore in your science fiction?

I'm particularly interested in application of the often ignored traditional African philosophies and sociocultural practices as frameworks for thinking about the future of humanity.

6) What are you currently working on?

l have two short stories coming later this year. One called “Encore” – a sequel to the first story in my collection CONVERGENCE PROBLEMS. Its about an AI-artist set 3 million years in the future and is one of my favorite stories I have ever written. It will appear in Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art, edited by Indrapramit Das, from MIT Press in October 2024.

Also in October, I have a horror-fantasy story coming from Subterranean Press called “Unquiet On The Eastern Front” which takes place across Africa during World War II as a British soldier comes face to face with the horrors of colonization, war, his own family legacy, and a stalking, terrifying creature. It will be available to read for free.

I'm also working on my second novel – a science fiction novel which is simultaneously a near-future thriller and a meditation on the nature of memory, legacy, and connectedness featuring assassins, aliens, AI, ancestral memory, and a lot more. No publicly available title yet, but I’m excited to finish this story I’ve been mulling over for years.

#talabi #shortinterviews

Grab a copy of Wole Talabi's latest short fiction collection.

Misha Burnett has little formal education, but has been writing poetry and fiction for around forty years. During this time he has supported himself and his family with a variety of jobs, including locksmith, cab driver, and building maintenance. His first four novels, Catskinner's Book, Cannibal Hearts, The Worms Of Heaven, and Gingerbread Wolves comprise a series, collectively known as The Book Of Lost Doors. More information about upcoming projects can be found at https://mishaburnett.wordpress.com/

1) According to you and apart from the number of words, what is the main difference between a short story and a novel?

I think that word count divisions are arbitrary, largely determined by the economics of printing. Ideally, a story should be as long as it takes to tell it, whether that's 5,000 words or 500,000. In practical terms, there are pressures on authors to write stories of a certain word count. There are a lot of novels that would have been good short stories but have been bulked out by tens of thousands of words of padding. My own sweet spot tends to be between 10,000 and 20,000 words, which many folks consider to be too long for a short story, but is far too short for a novel.

2) What's your favorite short story?

That's a tough one. Probably Bradbury. At this exact moment I would probably say, “There Will Come Soft Rains”. Ask me again tomorrow and it might be “The Veldt” or “Usher II”.

3) What's your favorite short story written by you?

Another tough question. I think I'll go with “She That Was So Proud And Wild” from my collection Dark Fantasies. I wanted to sketch out a world similar to ours, but containing fantastic elements, and in this world I set a thorny ethical problem, and I tried to do both of those things without a mass of exposition or preaching. I think I managed it. But, like the question above, if you ask me tomorrow I'll probably say something different.

4) The descriptions of your characters and their mentality are striking. Sometimes we recognize ourselves in a particular reaction (not necessarily a glorious one). Where do you get this ability to describe reality?

I paint what I see. I think it's important for a writer of fiction to be able to extrapolate from life experience. You can't know what it feels like to be attacked by a dragon, but you probably do know what it feels like to be an automobile accident, so use that. The caveat is that you have to be honest—there is always a temptation to describe what you think you should have been feeling, or to make it more like a movie. Introspection is vital for a fiction writer.

5) Modern SF is often characterized by a bleak view of human nature. In your work, the theme of redemption is prevalent and a certain optimism reigns. Can you tell us more about this?

Fiction is a vicarious activity. As readers, we experience things that didn't really happen, and do things that we didn't actually do. I read for pleasure, which means that I want to finish a book thinking, “If those things had happened to me and I reacted in the way that those characters reacted, I would feel good about myself.” So that's what I want to supply to my readers.

In addition, I think it's more realistic. Most people are decent, most of the time. At least in my experience, and I have met a lot of people in my life.

6) Your stories are real page-turners. Could you describe your writing process?

Primitive. I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop. I don't do drafts, I don't do outlines, I seldom rewrite anything. With very few exceptions, what you see on the page is exactly what I typed the first time. Lots of authors tell me that no one can write this way, that nothing that hasn't been rewritten a dozen times will ever sell, but I do okay with my method.

#burnett #shortinterviews

Grab a copy of Misha Burnett's Endless Summer: Twelve Strange Tales of Mankind's Future

Lewis Shiner's novels include BLACK & WHITE, the cyberpunk classic FRONTERA, and, most recently, OUTSIDE THE GATES OF EDEN (2019). He’s written about music for the VILLAGE VOICE, PULSE, CRAWDADDY, and others. His short fiction has appeared in SOUTHWEST REVIEW, BLACK CLOCK, and OMNI among others, and has been reprinted in a number of best-of-the-year anthologies. He lives in North Carolina.

1. According to you and apart from the number of words, what is the main difference between a short story and a novel?

J. G. Ballard proved in his “condensed novels” that short fiction can have the same thematic weight and chronological scope as a novel. I myself wrote a condensed novel called “Soldier, Sailor” and later expanded it into my first novel, FRONTERA. So I'm not sure there is a meaningful difference between short stories and novels other than the length. There is a famous story about the US President Abraham Lincoln, where somebody asked him how long a man's legs should be and Lincoln said, “Long enough to reach the ground.” How long should a piece of fiction be? Long enough to tell the story.

2. What's your favorite short story?

I tend to prefer novels to short stories, so I don't read a lot of them. If I'm going to invest time and effort to read about characters, I like to stick with them for a while. That said, there are a few short stories that I really admire. I recently read a story called “Christmas Eve 1953” by the US actor and director Tom Hanks that I thought was outstanding. It deals with two World War II veterans, one damaged physically, the other psychologically. It beautifully evokes that time period and shows how much the 1950s in the US was affected by the war.

Other favorite stories include “The Chrysanthemums” by John Steinbeck, who was my favorite author when I was a teenager, and “The King is Dead” by Walter Tevis, an incredibly suspenseful short story about chess, of all things. All three stories are about the way that characters deal with pain, both physical and emotional.

3. What's your favorite short story written by you?

I guess I would pick Canto MCML. I like all the things that are left unsaid in the story—I never explain where the characters are or what's going on in the rest of the world, yet I think (or at least hope) that there are enough clues that the readers can figure it out for themselves. It's also a very political story, which is increasingly important to me.

#shiner #shortinterviews

Travis J I Corcoran is a Catholic anarcho-capitalist software-engineering farmer. He's also a two-time Prometheus award-winning hard science fiction author.

1) According to you and apart from the number of words, what is the main difference between a short story and a novel?

I'm a terrible person to ask about this, because everything I start to write doubles or quadruples in size before it's done!

My two volume, 1300 pages Aristillus series (“The Powers of the Earth” and “Causes of Separation”) started as one 300 pages novel that metastasized, and my 1300 pages, two volume homesteading how-to encyclopedia (“Escaping the City, volume 1 and 2”) also started as a much slimmer volume.

I suppose the general societal explanation of a short story is that it explores a mood or a single idea, and it does so without digressions or side plots.

My own personal explanation is “a short story is something I start writing that turns into a novel, and a novel is something that I start writing that turns into a series”!

More seriously, though, when I aim to write a short story, I use just one narrative plot line, whereas when I intend to write a novel, I intentionally have multiple threads that braid together.

2) What's your favorite short story?

There's absolutely no way I can answer this – there are so many great short stories out there!

I think that the golden age of the science fiction short story was likely the 1940s through the 1980s, in all of the great magazines of that era like Amazing, Astounding, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni, and others. There were great hard science shorts, like “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin, great New Wave short stories like “Report on An Unidentified Space Station” by J. G. Ballard and “The New Father Christmas” by Brian W. Aldiss, great cyberpunk short stories like “Johnny Mnemonic” by William Gibson, and great atmospheric and internal short stories like the various Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury.

That's off the top of my head with like five seconds of reflection. If you gave me a day I could come up with a hundred... and if you gave me two days, I'd tell you that I needed a decade to go through decades worth of old SF magazines I've got shelved in a third floor bedroom to give any sort of reasonable answer.

3) What's your favorite short story written by you?

Staking a Claim, set in my Aristillus universe. It's about Robert Heinlein's “competent man” trope, and about the virtue of grit.

When a big challenge is dropped in your lap, you have two choices: push yourself and persevere, or give up and die. This is a question that I find to be endlessly fascinating, and always provides good fodder for a story.

Staking a Claim is about a mild mannered academic, Robert (it's not a coincidence that he has the same first name as Heinlein), who's rejected the modern university system and come to illegal Aristillus outpost on the moon, because that's the one way he can do what he loves – planetary geology. In the process of doing so, he finds himself in a tough spot, and is given the choice I mentioned earlier: dig deep to find grit and determination, or give up.

4) Do genetically uplifted dogs – which have not just intelligence, but a moral sense – have souls (specifically immortal souls)?

My answer is that this is a question which is woven through the four Aristillus novels (two of them already published, two of them in progress), plus a planned fifth book, which is a book-within-a-book, “written” by some of the uplifted Dogs of the Aristillus universe as a fictional back history to give a mythic racial saga / origin text, in much the same way that Tolkien created Lord of the Rings to give the British a foundational myth (Creation is good, and sub-creation is good, so why not sub-sub-creation?!).

#corcoran #shortinterviews

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults; HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about monopoly and conspiracy; IN REAL LIFE, a graphic novel; and the picture book POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER. His latest book is ATTACK SURFACE, a standalone adult sequel to LITTLE BROTHER; his next nonfiction book is CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM, with Rebecca Giblin, about monopoly and fairness in the creative arts labor market, (Beacon Press, 2022). In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

1. According to you and apart from the number of words, what is the main difference between a short story and a novel?

Here's the answer I gave to the LA Public Library:

A short story is like traveling with a carry-on bag, it can only contain your essentials. A novel is like hiring movers to load your whole life into a shipping container. A novella is like checking a bag or two, with enough room for some optional comfort items you're not sure you'll need but which you'll be glad to have.

2. What's your favorite short story?

I'm mistrustful of people who have solitary literary favorites – inevitably the text turns out to be the Bible, Mein Kampf, or Atlas Shrugged. I have hundreds of favorite short stories, one for every occasion.

3. What's your favorite short story written by you?

Same again! I'm very fond of MANY of my stories: Unauthorized Bread, 0wnz0red, The Man Who Sold the Moon, Anda's Game, I, Robot, I, Row-boat, The Martian Chronicles, and more.

#doctorow #shortinterviews

Prior to 2000 Neal Asher had stories accepted by British small press SF and fantasy magazines but post 2000 his writing career took flight. Pan Macmillan offered him a three-book contract and have now published many more UK, America, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Japan Czechoslovakia and Romania. The majority of his novels are set within one future history, known as the Polity universe. The Polity encompasses many classic science fiction tropes including world-ruling artificial intelligences, androids, hive minds and aliens.

1. According to you and apart from the number of words, what is the main difference between a short story and a novel?

Within the constraints of the word count, which I put as below 10,000 (you’ll get all sorts of variations on the defining word count) it must be a story that has a beginning, a middle and an end. In the beginning you world build and establish the theme – a problem to be solved – in the middle you get into the meat of the thing, character and reveals, and at the end you complete. The lines are blurred since you can world build all the way through, a reveal can be at the beginning or the end and also any problems don’t have to be solved.

For me it is as much an instinctive thing as with a novel: both of them must take the reader to another place and they must complete – they must have a satisfactory ending. What you don’t do is what the Slipstream writers of the 80s and 90s did whereby they introduced a character, some weird events and then just ended the lump of writing without a satisfactory conclusion.

A novel is the structure of a short story writ large. Everything can be expanded: more characters with more depth, extensive world building, a larger problem or a whole mass of them, tangled plot threads – you can be more relaxed and explore more. I guess a way to define either is by how you pack in ‘meaning’. In a novel you can put in more, with nuance, while in a short story you are constrained so every sentence has to have more meaning, more impact and deliver more of the goods. But again those constraints should not lead to the abandonment of structure and ‘completion’. I see this as a scale: series of books are a large expansion of all the above components, single books are a smaller expansion, collapsing down to novellas, novelettes, short stories and even to the smaller collapsed state where meaning is packed into every word and interrelation as in poetry.

2. What's your favorite short story?

That’s a difficult one. Having read a previous interview here with Peter Watts, I would, as he did, put Flowers for Algernon up there in the top short stories. Otherwise I’m quite vague about the matter. As with novels I don’t really have favourites or, rather, my choices vary with time, what I’m reading or what I remember. I know that Gift from the Culture by Ian M Banks sticks in my mine and I loved the collection State of the Art. I know that I have very much enjoyed short stories by Stephen King, while a particular collection of short stories, all of which were excellent, is Stories of your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. But beyond this I don’t have much more to say on the matter.

3. What's your favorite short story written by you?

Again, I like different ones for different reasons. Snow in the Desert, a story that has been published in a small press magazine called Spectrum SF, also Asimov’s, a Gardner Dozois collection, in my collection The Gabble and singularly on Kindle is much in my mind lately, but that’s certainly because I’ve seen it up on the screen in the second season of Love, Death and Robots on Netflix. It’s a favourite because of the legs it has! Others I like because of the strange biology and tech, like The Gabble, Softly Spoke the Gabbleduck and others besides. I’ve written a lot of short stories and when I look at the contents lists of various collections my opinion is all over the place. Better I think to define the stories of mine I like by the pleasure of creation when they arose out of a semi-lucid dreaming state and strayed into unexpected places. In this category falls one called The Gurnard. The latest, though more of a novella, is The Bosch (on Kindle), where I strayed into some deep weirdness.

#asher #shortinterviews

Neal Asher's website: https://www.nealasher.co.uk/

Patrick Abbott is finishing his first novel, Fallen. It is about a PTSD-affected veteran assigned to a diplomatic mission to an alien race visiting Earth. Patrick's experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as his reintegration into everyday life after his deployments inspire his writing. Additionally, he is a certified coach through the International Coaching Federation.

1. According to you and apart from the number of words, what is the main difference between a short story and a novel?

The main difference is in the story arch. A novel is an epic with various acts featuring rises and falls and includes depths of characters and locations. Short stories, meanwhile, are basically board games with everything already in place for the main action. Comparing written stories to visual art, novels are like renaissance paintings featuring tons of action and detail, while short stories are snapshot photographs. Yet, both have their place and can equally entertain and impart morals.

2. What's your favorite short story?

I have to go with Hopkins Well by Adrienne Ray for a written short story. In about a dozen or so pages, this hard science fiction story makes one think about what being alive truly means and the nature of the soul. Moreover, Hopkins Well shows overtly religious science fiction can be well written, serious, and not preachy.

However, many of my favorite short stories have been orally passed down. I am very fortunate that I grew up in an oral storytelling culture, and many places I have traveled to also have rich oral storytelling cultures. My favorite has to be a true story my grandparents told me about an odd and terrifying night on their farm in the 1970s. My very religious grandparents, one Calvinistic and the other Lutheran of the very German form, went to sleep in separate beds during a storm one night. Sometime late at night, my grandmother noticed a bright light shining through the window like a searchlight. She lay in bed in terror as the light began to move around the house, all the time shining into the farmhouse through various windows. To her, it was as if the light was looking for grandpa and her. Finally, after a slow revolution around the house, the light was gone. My grandmother was too afraid to call out to my grandfather, so she stayed still and silent until dawn. It was only at the breakfast table that she mentioned the strange light. To her shock, grandpa said he saw the light looking into the house, too. My grandfather admitted the light scared him. Mind you, this was a man who was known to run outside in the dark with a shotgun when he thought he heard something usual outside. Neither of them had any idea what that light was, and it never returned. Nevertheless, both could independently recall that night for the rest of their lives. That short story gave me an appreciation of the fact that there are some bizarre and unknown things out there.

3. What's your favorite short story written by you?

Written short stories are a future project for me. Orally, I absolutely enjoy telling biographies about significant moments of historical people. The unique twist is that I say the story in the second person, only revealing who the person is at the very end. This way, history becomes alive for the listener as they imagine them doing the things these great men and women did. I have found doing this makes people willing to learn more about history.

4. As a Catholic, what is your experience of faith & hope?

That's a profound question, ha! Faith and hope are intertwined in Catholicism, and this has impacted me on a personal and writing level. Catholicism has an infinitely deep cosmology that combines everything seen and unseen, known and unknown. And what makes it so unique is that everyone and everything is a main character in the cosmos because of God's direct relationship with it.

In my life, both in the United States and deployed, I have had some rough experiences. Things like friends dying, personal mistakes made, and family collapsing have all taken a toll. But I know that suffering isn't some random side effect but something meaningful and purposeful because of my faith and hope. Knowing this has helped me through some very dark times.

This outlook also has significantly impacted my writing. I seek to show how everyone in my stories has not only their own motivations but also dignity, past, fears, desires, and sense of righteousness. Rather than being one-dimensional bad guys or merely misunderstood, I strive to have the villains be “real” characters. Their worldview and goals exist beyond simply being something the protagonist can defeat or survive. Additionally, deep down, despite their actions and beliefs, they still have the same spark of fundamental goodness about them that the main character has.

#shortinterviews #abbott

Patrick Abbott's Substack

Marie Vibbert has sold over 70 short stories to magazines such as Nature, Vice, F&SF, and Analog. Her debut novel, Galactic Hellcats, is about a female biker gang in outer space rescuing a gay prince and was on the British Science Fiction Association long list for 2021. Her stories have been in year's best anthologies and translated into Chinese and Vietnamese. By day she's a computer programmer in Cleveland, Ohio. Learn more about her at https://marievibbert.com

1. According to you and apart from the number of words, what is the main difference between a short story and a novel?

I remember a teacher of mine once saying that novels are like wars, you spend the first half just getting the troops into position, whereas short stories are like surgical strikes: get in, drop the bombs, and leave before they go off.

Novels can be messy in a way that short stories don’t get away with … they have a lot of room to wander, and are often more about building a relationship between the reader and the characters. Short stories have to fit character, plot, and meaning in a much tighter space. The great thing about short stories is that tight space works well for exploring a single idea, and that’s why I think the short story has always been so important to the science fiction genre.

2. What's your favorite short story?

That’s a very tough question. I fall in love with a new ones all the time. One of my writing workshop mates wrote an absolute killer urban fantasy story last month that isn’t published yet, so watch for that from Joelle Presby. “The City Born Great” by N. K. Jemisin dominates my recent memory – I got to read it in two collections and for once wasn’t sad to see a repeat story! I dreamed for years of writing a story about the spirit of a city, and there she did it for me, and way better than I could.

3. What's your favorite short story written by you?

Would you pick from amongst your children?? Honestly, my favorites are unpublished. I have a haunting story about what it felt like growing up as a poor science fiction fan called “Flying Cars” and a noir crime time travel caper called “The Silver Dame and the Box of Mystery” – you can tell how much I love those stories because they’ve both gotten over 50 rejection letters each and I keep trying to send them out. But I feel like I ought to recommend something recent that’s online so your readers can enjoy it, so try “Things From Our Kitchen Junk Drawer That Could Save This Space Ship” on Daily Science Fiction (link).

#shortinterviews #vibbert

Peter Watts is a Canadian hard SF author. According to his website, he spent “ten years getting a bunch of degrees in the ecophysiology of marine mammals and another ten trying make a living on those qualifications without becoming a whore for special-interest groups”. He notably wrote BLINDSIGHT, a novel published in 2006 which is now considered a classic.

1. According to you and apart from the number of words, what is the main difference between a short story and a novel?

A short story is a snapshot; a single frame. A novel is a movie.

2. What's your favorite short story?

Tough one. I've loved a million of them over the years; back in the eighties, when I was first discovering William Gibson, almost every story in Burning Chrome blew me away. And I don't know if I've ever got as choked up by a story as I was by Keyes' “Flowers for Algernon”. But for present purposes, I have to settle on “The Screwfly Solution” by Alice Sheldon (aka James Tiptree Jr.).

Not that it's the most stylish story I've ever read. In fact, I found some of the prose a little clunky. But while some stories use SF tropes to explore scientific ideas, and others use those tropes as a platform for social commentary, not many knock it out of the park along both those axes. “The Screwfly Solution” is one of them: it seamlessly integrates ecological engineering, alien invasion, and institutional misogyny into one short punch in the gut. It's the distilled, concentrated essence of The Handmaid's Tale as if written by a molecular biologist. It effectively conveys the creeping, mortal dread of being Othered out of existence, while at the same time maintaining an almost clinical, anthropological perspective. And it is not the slightest bit preachy.

I wish she hadn't written it. Then there'd be maybe a one-in-a-thousand chance that I might have.

3. What's your favorite short story written by you?

That's like telling someone to decide which of their children they'd rescue from a burning building. Let me check.

Okay, I've just skimmed my c.v. And honestly, it would be easier to tell you which of my stories I like the least.

But if we're talking favorites, I'm going to go with the obvious: “The Things”, from 2010. It just has so many facets: an exploration of how Lamarckian biology might work, a fan-fic tribute to one of my favorite movies of all time—a chance to retcon a few of the admittedly dumber details of that movie—and, surprisingly, a pretty cool metaphor for colonialism and the religious impulse (that last aspect kind of snuck up on me; I didn't even realize I was going there until I was two-thirds of the way through writing the damn thing).

And it doesn't hurt that “The Things” made all those award ballots and BoY collections.

4. Regarding faith & God, do you have some doubts or not at all?

Being an empiricist means you always have to admit at least the possibility that you could be wrong about anything. So I can't rule God out completely (of course, by defining “God” as a force that transcends all physical laws and limitations, the theists conveniently immunized their invisible friends against disproof: it's hard to test for something that exists outside of known existence).

That said, though, religious beliefs do seem to be adaptive in a number of ways. Religious communities have longer lifespans than secular ones, all other things being equal; and within religious communities, those with the strictest, most unforgiving rules (Handmaid's Tales societies, if you will) seem to last longer (they think it has something to do with entry and exit costs). Belief in invisible surveillant entities effectively reduces cheating in large communities where you can't keep an eye on everyone all the time (even today, you can reduce the incidence of cheating on university exams by simply drawing a pair of eyes on the examination-room wall). And in a predator-filled environment, it makes sense to attach agency to every unexplained sound from behind or flicker from the corner of your eye, because any of those cues could signal a predator sneaking up on you (and even if it just turns out to be the wind in the grass, the cost of running away from a false alarm is way lower than the cost of ignoring a real one). So we've been programmed to see agency and intent in Nature, even when there isn't any. Belief in god(s) might just be a category error resulting from an ancient predator-avoidance response.

Bottom line, there are plenty of reasons to explain the ubiquity of religion that have everything to do with evolution and nothing to do with actual gods. And I have yet to encounter any kind of compelling philosophical argument for the existence thereof (the arguments I most frequently encounter either come down to wish fulfillment or God-of-the-Gaps—science hasn't explained this aspect of the universe yet therefore God must have done it!). There may be adaptive utility to such beliefs, but there's absolutely no explanatory power.

I gotta agree with Laplace on this one. I have no need for that hypothesis.

#watts #shortinterviews

Peter Watts' website: https://rifters.com