“SF WORLDS IN DARKNESS AND JOY”: AN INTERVIEW WITH TESS WILLIAMS, by Van Ikin and Helen Merrick

[2000]

Merrick: How much writing had you done before Map of Power (published by Random/Arrow in 1996)? Was this your first attempt at sf?

It wasn’t exactly my first attempt and I took a rather winding road to Map of Power. I was always a literate person and I clearly had some facility with language. This led to me teaching writing skills at university and doing a variety of writing and editing jobs—from hack reviews in small literary mags that I didn’t invest a great deal in to sensitive and socially useful information on children dying in hospitals which I’m still proud of. All terrific training, though at the time I didn’t realize it—I just thought I was making a living of a very humble sort. Meanwhile there was this sort of psychological rumbling underneath these activities which was becoming louder—a discontent with writing that was done only to meet other people’s needs and expectations. It finally became so loud that I knew I had to get serious and find out what it was that I needed to write for myself.

I was pretty shocked when the stuff that rolled off my pen was clearly embryonic sf. For some unknown reason I had assumed I would be a “literary” writer and my very experimental “other worldly” pieces took me completely by surprise. However, I was very open to what that rumbling demanded and I decided it was best to let it have its wicked way with me. I’ve never regretted that.

I think I did about eight short “practice pieces” before I plunged into the novel. Few of those early pieces survived intact. One became my first real short story, “The Padwan Affair,” which was published in She’s Fantastical about a year before Map of Power came out. It seems to be one of the profession’s little ironies that often a writer has to write a novel before they can manage a good short story. Ray Bradbury said of this that he wrote a million words before he wrote a good story, then he wrote another million before he realized what had made it good.

Ikin: To the public you’ve had a dream-run as author, with your first novel eagerly snatched up by a major publisher, Random House, and then marketed as their Arrow Books lead title for the month of release. But the glamour of success hides long, hard work, doesn’t it?

Oh yes. A committed writer needs to figure out why they write, who they wish to speak to, what it is they want to say and then, finally, they have to figure out how to say it effectively. This is the involved process of “finding voice.” It can be both grueling and joyful, but it is always work. Map of Power took me a long time to write—three years of working blind. All in all, a huge commitment in emotion, time, money and energy—a commitment which necessarily had to be made from a position where I had no real idea of my own capacities as a writer or much hope that there would be any interest in my work when it was finished.

As far as publication is concerned, I consider myself extraordinarily lucky. I came along at a time when the larger presses were beginning to show an interest in genre markets in Australia. Pan Macmillan and Harper Collins had already taken the plunge and Random House were looking for an sf writer. I fitted their particular niche well, a sort of “highbrow” writer in a popular genre. And I have to say that Map of Power really did everything that a hopeful writer would want their first novel to do. It was marketed as a lead title, obtained some good reviews from people I respect, and sold quite well. Maybe that’s what “dream runs” are made of—a combination of commitment, hard work and good luck.

Ikin: Map of Power reflects your belief that a writer’s decision to work in the field of “popular fiction” does not preclude that writer from dealing with serious issues. Can you outline these views, and how they were formed?

As an sf reader I had not encountered the pulps until quite recently, and my reading had always led me to thinking of sf as an “ideas” genre. My teenage reading was largely the British school of sf—John Wyndham, H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Arthur C. Clarke and even C.S. Lewis. My genre experience then jumped to an odd combination of television Star Trek shows and feminist writings, both of which expressed positions on social and scientific issues of the day. They fascinated me, but I suspect I was not a typical adolescent sf fan in that, although I was reading anything I could get my hands on in the local library that struck my interest, sf formed only a part of my diet. Among other things I read at that time, and continue to read deeply, are psychology, myth, experimental literature, general science writing, space exploration, art and artists, drama, biographies and poetry. My tastes have always been eclectic, thus a wide range of interests nourish both my reading and my writing.

The key for me with the writing is that I don’t write sf just from loving and reading sf. I write sf because I think it is an ideal genre through which to express all the interests and strange obsessions I have. To me my writing is always a synthesis of my art, politics, experience and passion, and while the genre is an ideal vehicle for cultural commentary (and I take full advantage of that!) it is also a very personal journey that I am taking which transfigures my life understandings and my questions into narratives that I can share with many other people. I know that there are those who would find this a curious way to approach genre writing, and something that runs contrary to its public perception as formulaic, but it works for me.

Ikin: The critical reception for Map of Power was of the kind that other writers would die for. How did you find your first major experience of reviewers? Did they pick up on the themes and issues in the novel that were most important to you?

Overall I have been satisfied with my reviews. Most of them were quite decent and fair in acknowledging that my writing was good and the characters were credible and strong. Intelligent reviewers also identified some of the political and psychological patterns of the book, such as feminism and the focus on the paradox of the powerful/powerless outsider. However, most of them failed to really come to grips with the book. I don’t blame the reviewers for this at all, rather I would say that my writing is slippery and it presents some real difficulties when trying to situate it in the field.

This is a problem which is directly related to the bogie of labeling and I have to say that I’ve changed my position on this considerably since first being published. My first concern when I submitted Map of Power was that I would be ghettoized into science fiction and I really wanted some of the more literary qualities of the work to be appreciated. My rather naive idea was that the book should be read as it is. I’ve since discovered this doesn’t really work. This is partly due to reader expectations, critical confusions and market pressures, but it is also to do with a responsibility I have to identify my own position when I present a text. This was much easier to do as an editor than as a writer and the anthology Women of Other Worlds taught me a lot about positioning a book in a niche market.

In that anthology, Helen and I were able to quickly get an overview of the work and pick up certain threads. When you are an editor you can and must also act as a critic with the work you are producing. This is a much more difficult process with your own work. Particularly if many of the themes and ideas of a complex work are themselves maturing through the writing process.

Now, after I have finished my second book, a novella and some more short stories, I have a clearer idea of what it is I am doing and how I can best be read and present myself. I know, for example, that not only do myths lie at the center of my literary world, but the power of children’s narratives and narratives about women and children are central to my work. It is as if my sf worlds in all their darkness and joy grow from the tales that impress themselves upon a child’s psyche. Other things I now know are that I am not only a feminist writer, I am an eco-feminist writer. I am someone who doesn’t just fantasize new worlds, I insist on dealing with this one by recognizing the threats and promise it holds and acknowledging that it is shared territory. To try and examine this I construct situations where there are conflicts of interest and no one voice is dominant. These partial perspectives also make my writing “cyborg,” as I try to write those often uncomfortable spaces between biology and machinery, between visible and invisible and between human and non-human.

Some of this clarification came from reviews. More of it came from sensitive readers who did not put pen to paper but were prepared to be generous with their time and chose to read and discuss my work with me.

Merrick: You are currently writing your Ph.D. dissertation at The University of Western Australia. What can you tell us about the topic?

I was originally going to write on cyborgs and science fiction, paying particular attention to how traditional mythical narratives contributed to stories of composite creatures but—as is the way of PhDs—I read myself into somewhere completely different. Now I am looking at radical evolutionary theories or reinterpretations of traditional evolutionary theory and applying them as a critical tool to science fiction. There is some very juicy stuff there as science fiction is fundamentally a genre of evolution and change.

And I have to add—though I do enjoy it!—that reading hard core scientific writing about subjects like protobiogenesis, panbiogeography and non-mendelian genetic mechanisms is hard work!

Merrick: How does the academic work sit with your creative writing—do the two overlap or feed into each other in any way?

They do overlap and I was fortunate enough to do a Masters degree in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia a few years ago. This degree combined a creative component with an academic component, thus marrying what are often perceived as quite different processes. I believe doing this degree gave me confidence in my academic work and it also gave my creative work a sophistication it previously did not have. This is not to say that a knowledge of theory is necessary for good writing, but it can prove very useful in refining many of the different facets of a work such as Map of Power, or the recent manuscript I have finished titled Sea As Mirror, and it is certainly useful in knowing how to present the work and where it fits in the field.

However, there are a couple of points I’d like to make about the intersection of academic and creative work. The first one is that strong lines have to be drawn between the creative and the critical processes, as it is almost impossible to write if one’s internal critic is attempting to theorize the writing as it appears. Both the critic and the editor must be silent when the creator is at work. Later they can be as vocal as they want, and indeed they may be extremely helpful, but they just get in the way when the primary objective is simply to get words down on the page.

I know this sounds dangerously like compartmentalized thinking, but it isn’t really. I’ve found that similar processes are present in committed academic writing as well. To write a thesis or an exegesis, the same rules apply: the creative drive must be allowed to synthesize information and ideas without worrying about being correct in every detail. In a first draft of anything there are always sloppy joins, repetitions, contradictions and grammatical atrocities. That doesn’t matter. A first draft is like the first rough shelter to keep the rain away. Holes in the wall can be patched later and the windows can be waterproofed in time for the downpour. What is important is that the walls are up and the roof is on.

The second point is the intersection of ideas in the academic and creative sphere. This is quite complex too. For instance, I have a passionate interest in alternative (non-Darwinian) theories of evolution, and evolution is a theme and sometimes an actual mechanism that figures strongly in my long creative pieces. However, even in Sea As Mirror—a book which is about evolution—I could use only a fraction of the information I have from my study. If I went into too much detail, I would risk boring my readers to death as well as losing them in some of the complex notions I am examining. So I do a lot of work and some of it is directly relevant and useful, other work will possibly be processed into fiction at a much later date or may even remain of academic interest only.

Merrick: You juggle a number of identities, in addition to writer and academic—including teacher of sf and creative writing and also editor. Could you tell us about these other activities, and how you manage to juggle them all?

Don’t leave out “mother”! That’s a bigger and more demanding part of my identity than all the rest put together, particularly as I am a long-term single parent.

What can I say about it all? First, I’ll steal a line from Alien Resurrection and say I think it’s a “chick thing.” Fragmentation has been identified as lifestyle for many women, and I have firsthand experience of it in several ways. It can be bad when it simply becomes serial role-playing and someone slips in and out of personas with practiced ease, eventually forgetting to link their various realities. The result of that is a loss of any sense of self. However, it can also be very good when those multiple identities are linked and therefore create, rather than evict, your life. Having wobbled between those two extremes in the earlier days of my patchwork career, I know it’s very important to remember why I do things. At this stage I do the juggling because it is one way in which I can get some time to write, but the price is high.

That’s the personal angle. The creative line on this situation is interesting. I believe it has ultimately been positive. My novel narratives benefit greatly from my ability to think in multiple streams and to patiently knit disparate experiences towards set, common goals or resolutions. One of the features of my writing that is often remarked upon is the credibility of the separate worlds my characters inhabit. I can write that way because borderline multiple personality is a daily experience for me. Kind of, “If this is Tuesday I must be...!”

My political angle on this is not so cool. Although the various aspects of my life are starting to come together now (I write, study and teach in roughly the same area), I have spent a lot of time unsupported and torn between important commitments. This has led me to be very overworked and underpaid and I think I am only one representative of a growing underclass of well educated women who are systematically exploited through insecure, part-time, short-term contractual positions. It’s not a situation this country should be proud of and it’s not a situation that the people who are affected should be happy with.

How long can I go on juggling so many roles? I don’t know. What will I do when I can no longer reconcile the benefits of this lifestyle with the disadvantages? Once again, I don’t know.

Ikin: Do you think sf is unique in providing an environment where a writer can juggle so many roles? Are you starting to feel like you are part of “the community”?

Sf does seem to be unique in this way. That’s one of the things that Helen and I point out in our introduction to Women of Other Worlds. Many of the contributors to that volume are high-profile women sf writers, but they can appear in quite different roles in that book. We have creative writers offering essays, ficto-critical writing and fan reports, academics as fans and interviewers, and—of course—a creative writer and academic as editors. It really does make the sf community special in that it has a large number of versatile, talented people who are prepared to participate in the many different dialogues generated within the community.

With regard to feeling as if I am part of that community, I am actually a really shy and quite reserved person so it has taken me a while to become comfortable in the community and sometimes I still become confused by undercurrents of emotion and politics that I don’t understand. There is so much history in fandom. I am, however, learning the ropes and I have to say that I think I’m very lucky in this respect to be in Western Australia. Swancons are usually good fun and the fans are really warm people. I know I haven’t been accepted with open arms by everyone, but I’ve never had problems with anyone I respect and the general attitude has been very supportive of writers.

Merrick: Can you give us a summary of what your Murdoch University sf course covers?

A little bit of this, and a little bit of that! It was a course originally designed to try to boost enrolments in English—and it worked. It has a basic historical framework with some nice detours around areas like sf art and comics, Russian sf, feminist sf, fifties sf films, slashzines and cyberpunk. We start with Verne and Wells and end with James Tiptree Jr. and Kate Wilhelm. It’s a bit of a cook’s tour and can be frustrating for people who are very well read in the area, and a bit confusing for those who have never come into contact with sf before (Yes, Virginia, people like that do exist!).

It’s a great course to teach, though at times it’s like riding an unbroken horse and I really don’t know what to expect. I always have one or two students who actively dislike the genre and others who know more about some writers than I do, because they have read authors who have not attracted my attention. There is also an amazing range of students—they come from all disciplines and they bring with them a vast range of theoretical approaches. Ironically, literature students can sometimes be my worst students as they just don’t get it that not all literature has to be psychological. It can be hard for them to understand that the idea is the emotional core of the work and they resent the focus given to history, politics and particularly science in the narrative.

Merrick: You have also recently been asked to join the Editorial Board of Eidolon. Where do you see your career going in the future? Will writing still be your main focus?

I’m at an interesting point in my life as a writer right now. Sea As Mirror is finished and I am very happy with it. I also feel confident with my short fiction. I’m having fun studying and I’m teaching work that I like. My role at Eidolon is not terribly demanding and I’m glad to contribute in some way. There are some other things on the drawing board, but the most immediate major project in my future now is my PhD.

I do swear off writing every now and then, particularly when I’m feeling under-funded and under-appreciated, but I don’t know if I could actually stop. Besides, I owe my readers the conclusion of Map of Power, so I know that I have at least one more book to write!

Ikin: Your new novel Sea as Mirror had its birth in a short story of the same name. “Sea as Mirror” the story is obviously very, very different from Sea as Mirror the novel, so I wonder if you could take us through some of the stages of the evolution of this project?

The short story “Sea as Mirror” was one of those early experimental pieces of writing done before I started Map of Power. It had a couple of airings. The first was at a workshop with the West Australian poet Suzanne Covich. She told me it was a feminist creation myth and she just loved it. That was very heartening. However, I did nothing more with it until it came out of the bottom drawer again for consideration by the Creative Writing group at the University where I was doing my MA. It had a much more mixed reception there. Several people resisted the idea of sentience in another species so violently I was quite mystified by their response. Obviously I had hit some sort of nerve. I had written one of those stories that people either really love or really hate.

With some encouragement I decided to pursue the story further. I did a radio script of the story first (I thought such poetic language read to bird calls, whale noises and the sea would sound lovely—I still think that!), then I decided to amalgamate the whale story with another of my experimental pieces called “No Less than Trees and Stars” which was about a human-whale relationship. The novel grew from there and I think it grew so well and so strong because I loved it so much.

For a long time, Sea as Mirror was like a well fed secret. Even when I had doubts that it would work as long fiction, the story had a ‘rightness’ to it that meant I had to continue with it. I think it was very telling the day that I was criticized for writing this piece: that was probably the first time I had not been personally affected by a negative reading of my work. I just knew those people were wrong! And a certainty about this unusual story grew from that which led to me wanting to do justice to the power and ideas in the story. And I think I have now.

Merrick: The amount of research involved in Sea as Mirror was absolutely staggering: you had to gain an in-depth understanding of various aspects of evolutionary process, whale physiology, American geography, the issue of biodiversity and other things. You even had to read up on magazines like Newsweek and Time until you could mimic their journalistic style!

This relates in some respects to the whole genre issue again. I do read widely and eclectically and I read the world and its issues in a very political and mythic way. That’s why I can’t just write about my own personal experience; I’m too aware of cultural issues to keep them out of my work. They become actors on my stage. You see, I don’t see myself as writing hero-centered fiction which is the traditional form in Western culture at this time (even in fantasy and sf!). I write fiction with multiple foci: human and non-human, personal and social, mythic and scientific. No one character or idea is center-stage all the time. Elizabeth is important, as is her unusual relationship with the whales, Tachotic and Chiten—but then so is the unpleasantness of colonial politics and the way it shapes science projects. So are media vendettas and the wild cards the natural world throws up. Even religion gets the treatment in this book!

As for the journalistic style...! That was the part of the novel that gave me the most trouble. I couldn’t stay faithful to the story and be truly journalistic, so I compromised and made the article someone’s private column. That allowed the writing to be broader and be issue based rather than strict news presentation or editorial address.

And my final point answering this question is probably the most important. I graze on knowledge much like cows graze on grass and it is no problem for me to deal with lots of different kinds of information in a novel. When I was researching Map of Power I had to figure out what the environmental problems in Australia and the Antarctic would be in two hundred years and how to build a space station. But the book is ultimately not a collection of information; it has to have a heart. For me, the heart of the book is the nub of the matter. It’s the point of synthesis of all the information and history of the people in the world of the novel to that point. The heart of the book is the profound cultural story that shapes the characters’ psychology and drives the society—usually without anybody really knowing it. Figuring that out and how to address it takes some work. It takes what I call deep thinking. And that’s what makes my books effective, I believe. Their depth even more than their breadth.

Merrick: By far the most compelling and fascinating task imposed by the novel was the need to be able to work out how a whale might understand life and the universe. We lucky people who have read Sea as Mirror ahead of publication date have been astounded by the way you take us into a whale’s consciousness and unfold its language and its cosmology. How on earth did you even begin to go about grappling with this utterly alien perspective?

I’ve been interested in whales for years. When my oldest son was a baby, I used to play humpback whale songs to him to get him to sleep. I read about whales and I really thought about them a lot. I found their world amazingly different and I invested quite a lot of mental energy in wondering what it would be like. For example, every breath a whale takes is voluntary. If a whale loses consciousness, there is no autonomic nervous system to simply keep handling that vital function. So, how do they sleep? And that’s only one of dozens of questions that I asked. What do the observations that have been made of whole pods breathing in synchrony mean for whale society? Why are there so many documented cases of killer whales electing not to take humans as food when they have the opportunity? Why do killer whales seem to lose about half of their young?

I sifted these and many other problems for years. Unable to do the direct observational research I would have loved to do, I did the next best thing. I built a creative vision of how things might be for the whales. I tried to imagine a society that would fit all these strange facts, and then I went further. I tried to imagine how it would be to live in water all the time. Not just in the postcard snaps we tend to have of whales breaching on lovely days, but during the night and in the storms. Out in the very deep. How would their senses read the world? This is very important because sight is not their primary sense and so much of their experience would be darkness. Seeing would not be as important to them as echolocation or hearing is—that is why I have them “listening the world.”

I tried to imagine how language in such a society would be influenced by the movements of the waves, how speech would be soft and sensuous, interspersed with choppy, repetitive, rhythmic sounds. And how their thinking would have to be a little like that too.

I had to imagine what would be important to them as possibly moral creatures, so I gave them a deity, but I made the deity conform to whale biology. Just as we anthropomorphize everything, so I felt they would do that to the world in their own way. Their deity has three parts, the Mother which is the sea, the Father, which is land, and god-in-air which is a more indifferent, less personal entity and is embodied in the sun and the moon. The whales—the Curore—see the sun and moon as the eyes of god-in-air. That the eyes move independently is not a problem for them as whales have completely different views of the world through each eye.

Most of what I say is backed by some sort of information, but I have taken some creative liberties with creating the Curore. For example, what I often shorthand as “songs” in the whale chapters of Sea as Mirror is more likely to be lots of grunts, creaky noises and squeals from Killer whales!

And I like the words you use in this question. To me the whales are more “utterly alien” than most of the aliens that are written about in endless examples of speculative fiction. Their biology is largely known, and contact has been made. But how much further have we got with all our scientific approach? We can say little definitive about them other than to give the weight of their brains and to identify which organs are used for which senses. Human arrogance sometimes astounds me. I remember years ago arguing with people when the first radio packages were being sent out into space in the hopes of contact. I’d say, “What if this intelligent species doesn’t speak maths?” or “What if they have no tools?.” I can’t tell you how many times the people I spoke to just didn’t understand when I said something could be an intelligent life form and not be like us. Oh well, perhaps if some of those people read Sea as Mirror they’ll finally realize what I was on about!

Ikin: Another striking feature of both your novels is the way you present your female characters. Like Kass in Map of Power, Elizabeth in Sea as Mirror is not a stereotypical modern-Amazon style of female, but rather a realistically vulnerable woman whose feminist principles are not always matched by her actions. It is as if you seem deeply uncomfortable with the way so many recent novels (both sf and mainstream) show contemporary women as feisty, free, and independent—almost as if the battles of feminism had been won, and won easily....

Absolutely. I see two significant issues here that are addressed by Sea as Mirror. The first is that we are not going to find any permanent solutions to any of our problems simply by turning women into mark 2 versions of men. Although battles for equity mean we are fighting for equal treatment and opportunity for everyone—which is sound—there is an inbuilt problem there. We can’t just thoughtlessly aim to shape all the citizens of our culture to achieve a standard of living where their rights compromise others. For example, I believe we have a social responsibility to make sure people do not go without basic food, shelter, medical care and education, but meeting these needs does not include the right to export the costs of an affluent life to less fortunate countries, or the right to destroy the environment and other plant and animal species to obtain products that are fashionable. This is simply giving everyone permission to behave badly. That’s not real equity. It’s great to see female characters who do not lie down and do as they’re told, but giving them a knife, a gun, and a “don’t-give-a-damn” attitude extends certain problems rather than resolves them.

The second issue is the “post-feminism” idea that tends to be fostered by images of strong women. That whole construct is positively dangerous, as is the notion of “post-colonialism.” It’s like we’re saying Oh, we’re so cool and grownup we’ve left all that stuff behind. Bollocks we have! The battles of feminism and colonialism have a long way to go yet and we’ve only really just started to negotiate the environmental and world justice war. I think it is good to have positive and strong women characters in books, but that is not enough in itself. Portraying characters who were traditionally submissive as more powerful tends to mask a whole series of dominations and exploitations that are built into (particularly Western) culture and experienced very differently by different groups at different points.

For example, as an adult, Elizabeth fights many battles on many fronts. Some she loses, some she wins, some don’t resolve clearly at all. Just like in real life. But one of the serious questions the book raises is that people have to experience life as children first. Where I don’t necessarily see children as victims or completely powerless—some of my short stories have very strong children in them—my understanding is that children are generally a very disenfranchised and vulnerable group.

Ikin: To misquote Helen Reddy, your character Elizabeth seems to be a woman who sometimes doesn’t “roar” at the moment when she should (and when she wants to). But both of your novels are about power, and the point of your fiction is to show that real power—and real change—is the result not so much of “roaring” as of doing. Is that a fair statement?

I think my two most powerful characters are Kass from Map of Power and Elizabeth from Sea as Mirror. Simply put, they are not traditional warriors. Their power comes not so much from “roaring”—though they both do speak out against what they see as wrong—but from following their truths. Sometimes this involves speaking out, as when Elizabeth tackles Granger or Kass tackles Hovar, but more often it involves going their own way and pursuing what they see as the most important reality. This is because power is complex and they can’t hope to fix what is wrong simply by identifying it. If that worked we’d live in a perfect world because most people know what is wrong already.

I suppose one of the features that tends to identify my fiction as anti-heroic is that the character’s internal sense of justice or “rightness” doesn’t just simply win out in the end and leave everyone feeling good. By the end of the story, there is usually a victory of some sort, but it can be a pyrrhic victory. These women who understood so much were right but that sometimes didn’t fix things. What they did do, however, is at least to open a door to a different future. Not a perfect one. Power is an ongoing issue. But as Joseph Campbell says of the myths and stories that govern our culture, they can change when people and/or societies are ready to deal with the issues that have kept us imprisoned in those repeated cycles of pain and destruction. Characters like Kass and Elizabeth, and even Gretheling from my story “Out of Time Come Prophets,” do that. They deal. They might not win in every sense but they win in some important way because they deal!