Facebook Interview

You are generally considered the most decorated writer of short speculative fiction. In your opinion, what is the key to a successful short story?

If you just count Hugos, Connie Willis and a couple of others are ahead of me. The Locus list, which you are quoting, counts not just Hugos but all major awards from all over the world.

In answer to your question, I think when all is said and done, a story must make an emotional impact on the reader. It must move him—to laughter, to tears, to fear, to sympathy, to anger, to something. If it makes him think, so much the better, and the author has written a better story for it—but if it doesn’t make him feel, then it fails as a story, even as it may succeed as a polemic or a technological crossword puzzle in prose form.

You often write about Africa and, in particular, the problems caused by colonialism. What do you see as the biggest current challenges facing that continent? And is there an attitude or misperception toward colonialism that you would you most like to change through your writing?

The biggest problem right now is a continent-wide corruption on a scale unimaginable to those who haven’t been there (and no, tourists have not been to the real Africa). Robert Ruark wrote an international bestselling novel about the Mau Mau back in the 1950s titled Sonething of Value. The meaning of the title is that if you are going to take away a people’s culture, you had better replace it with something of value or you’ve got a big problem on your hands. 50 years after Ruark, we still haven’t replaced it with anything of value to Africans, and we have 40+ separate and distinct big sub-Saharan problems on our hands.

You have said that your Lucifer Jones novels are particular favorites of yours. Is this true, and if so, is there a specific reason?

I prefer writing humor to anything else, though of course my reputation is based on my serious work. And of all the humor I’ve written, which comes to maybe a dozen books and 90 or more stories in this field, what I most enjoy writing are the Lucifer Jones stories. They’re parodies of every bad B-movie and trite pulp magazine I read when I was growing up, and the language is a delightful cross between the purple prose of Trader Horn and the fractured English of Pogo Possum. Some of the story and chapter titles will give you a broad hint: “The Island of Annoyed Souls,” “The Clubfoot of Notre Dame,” “A Jaguar Never Changes Its Stripes,” “The Best Little Tabernacle in Nairobi,” and so on. They’re just a pure delight to write.

You are the executive editor of Jim Baen’s Universe, which is closing as of April 2010. The closing has been handled masterfully, but it still seems a sad thing for the industry as a whole. Is there anything you’d like to say about that? And, as a corollary, from your perspective, what are the happiest and unhappiest current trends in speculative fiction publishing.

Jim Baen’s Universe had a fine business model when Jim conceived it and started it, but that statement was invalid before the magazine was a year old. (I joined it in its second year.) The notion was to pay the major writers a quarter a word, three times the top rate of the digests, and to run a couple of hundred thousand words an issue—and against the competition that existed when the magazine debuted, against Asimov’s, F&SF and Analog, it made sense to pay those rates, put together that many words, have sparking, moving covers by a top artist like Don Mattingly, and charge $30 a year for a basic 6-issue subscription. After all, when you compared values, we were giving you more big names and more words than the digests for the same price.

But as it turned out, after we’d been in business for about a year, we were no longer in competition with the digests. We were in competition with Subterranean Magazine (which was running people like John Scalzi, Lucius Shepard, Elizabeth Bear, Joe Lansdale and myself in just about every issue), and Clarkesworld (which ran stories by Tobias S. Buckell, myself in collaboration with Lezli Robyn, and similar), and a dozen other e-zines that were paying pro rates and were free.

How do you compete with that? Suddenly a bunch of e-zines were almost matching our firepower (and in the case of Subterranean, totally matching it) and not charging a penny. Suddenly that $5.00 an issue didn’t look like such a bargain.

We had other problems. Asimov’s came back from a near-death experience thanks to selling a few thousand issues a month via Kindle and Fictionwise/Barnes/the “Nook.” But Baen Books felt that our going to Kindle or Fictionwise would abrogate our distribution agreement with Simon & Schuster, so that was a potential lifeline that was denied us.

Weep us no tears. We announced the ending far enough in advance so that no subscriber would be left with paid-for-but-unreceived issues, no writer would deliver a commissioned story only to be told that the magazine was full and/or couldn’t pay for it, and no serial would be cut off in the middle. We showed the way, and when I took a quick count tonight, there are, excluding Jim Baen’s Universe, 18 magazines paying pro rates, and 14 of them are e-zines.

I know you write primarily in Science Fiction, but do you have any favorite fantasy writers? Any writers of short fantasy fiction for our fans at fantasy http://www.facebook.com/l/2e79e;literature.com to watch for?

I’m no stranger to writing fantasy, or to appreciating it. Among the classics, I most admire T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, which I find far superior to Tolkien or C. S. Lewis. I’m also a fan of Orlando Furioso. I believe that Unknown, with stories as diverse as Sturgeon’s “Yesterday Was Monday,” Williamson’s Darker Than You Think, Heinlein’s “Magic, Inc.” and Leiber’s Gray Mouser stories, was far and away the greatest fantasy magazine of all time. More recently, I loved Lisa Goldstein’s The Red Magician, Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs, Arthur Byron Cover’s Autumn Angels, and of course you could do a lot worse than Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Oh, and let’s not forget Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth. And while I have no interest in or admiration for paranormal romances] there is nothing wrong with the source: Bram Stoker’s still-brilliant Dracula.