Jean-Paul L. Garnier: One theme of The Iron Garden Sutra concerns failed generation ships and the existential troubles they face during their journeys. I have read several books recently with similar takes on generation ships. Do you feel that this kind of story reflects a growing tension between generations in the real world and youth feeling that they have been dealt a bad hand by previous generations?
A.D. Sui: Generation ships are a long-standing tradition in sci-fi. What’s not alluring about packing up ourselves into a tin can and running off into the universe in search of greener pastures? But in my opinion, it’s also a very naïve take. Space is hostile. Space is hard. But there is a romanticism in cutting and running. Staying is, arguably, far more difficult.
I think every generation feels that pull of running away from their reality. Every generation can say that they have been dealt a bad hand. Millennials are economically disadvantaged because of policies enacted by Gen X and Boomers (and yes, have lived through three recessions now, but who’s counting?). Gen Xers felt they’ve been invisible all their lives. Boomers, I’m sure, felt disadvantaged in some way as well. Hard to imagine now, but one might. The generation before probably felt that they were unfairly thrust into a war that was only possible because of what the previous generation had done. And this is just the North American perspective. There are many more global conflicts, recessions, and other strains on each generation. We all want to run away, thinking that it will be better. To where? No one knows for sure, but somewhere that isn’t here.
Part of The Iron Garden Sutra’s theme is deciding when to stand your ground and fight for the things we believe in. Even if we are one person. Even if the outcome doesn’t look hopeful. Millennials are of the age when our financial decisions and our voting have the most impact. Some of us are even in positions of influence. Some are making decisions on scales that will impact the next generation (hi, Gen Z, and sorry). We can continue to bemoan the hand we’ve been dealt, or we can also work towards leaving things better for those who are coming after us. I, personally, am a huge fan of complaining while doing the thing.
It’s going to suck and it’s going to be a lot of work, sure, but we can leave a better world for those after us.
You’ve also created a religion in this novel, The Starlit. What did the process of creating a theology look like for you, and please tell us about the introduction of cosmology into the religion of peoples who have colonized the stars?
The Starlit is loosely based on Zen Buddhism. I have a very strong preference for non-monotheistic religions and like pondering where they can end up in thousands of years. What is the natural progression of something like Zen if it was supported into the future? What would its practitioners decide to keep and what would they discard? Because religion does change! Doctrine does change! It changes very slowly since religious institutions are massive and can’t afford to throw their entire weight around every other week, but it does change.
I think the introduction of cosmology is the natural transition, given how we commonly incorporate elements from our immediate environments into religious texts. Parting the Red Sea, trudging through deserts, and all that. If people are traversing between stars frequently, then star-like language would begin bleeding into texts.
Jean-Paul L. Garnier: What inspired you to conduct the series of interviews in Human Voices, Alien Conversations, and how do you go about selecting interviewees?
James Machell: Several of the interviews had appeared in Utopia Science Fiction Magazine and Electronic Brain. What I wanted to do with Human Voices, Alien Conversations was pull them together into one narrative, and additional interviews were conducted to fill what I perceived to be the gaps in the collection as an overview of SF in the 21st Century. In order to show this with a bird’s eye, I couldn’t just focus on writing when there’s art, editing, performance, and adaptation. I also wanted to explore understated significance. Samuel R. Delany, for example, is nowhere near as well known as Andy Weir, but his influence, even at the time of composing his major works, has been much more profound. Similarly, Chris Moore, with his prog-rock styled art for the SF Masterworks Series, created some of the most recognisable images in the history of SF but did so quietly, never chasing awards or drawing attention to himself: he let his art speak. Cyberpunk, almost exclusively associated with William Gibson, was developed by a “team” of writers in the ‘80s: I thought it would be much more interesting to speak with Pat Cadigan, who is frequently dubbed the “queen” of the subgenre. But I couldn’t just focus on the legends when their contributions to SF are constantly evolving through their influence on younger writers. Interviewees, therefore, vary greatly in age, juxtaposing the perspectives of those blossoming into the SF landscape with those who loosened the soil. Bogi Takács, Samantha Mills, and Ai Jiang, also included in Human Voices, Alien Conversations, are writers we should be looking out for. The final interview is with Matthew Holness, co-writer, co-director, and star of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, which gets my vote as the most underappreciated use of SF in visual media. As Holness is now working on the third in a series of spin-off novels, he was ideal to pull everything together.
JPG: How do you go about researching your subjects in preparation for interviews?
JM: Most of the interviewees were selected because I’d been enjoying their work for years. The questions came easily. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, however, were excellent resources for pinning down dates and discovering aspects of their careers which may have eluded even the most die-hard fan.
JPG: What do you see as some of the main concerns and themes in early 21st Century science fiction?
Tristan Evarts is the editor of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, and since 2019 he has overseen the publication of optimistic prose, poetry, non-fiction, and art. The magazine operates with a reverence for the classics of the SF canon while pushing to explore new ways of living, technology as a friend rather than enemy, and humanity adapting to present crossroads. Themes push writers to examine the different manifestations of utopia, ranging from language to disability to weird SF. Contributors include Beth Cato, Jean-Paul L. Garnier, and Bogi Takács. Cover artists range from Donato Giancola to Stephen Youll to Alyssa Winans. Every December, Utopia SF publishes an art special, showcasing a broad range of talent, with a portion of the profits donated to charity.
Tristan gave me my start as an SF interviewer when he took me on as outreach manager in 2023, so it’s a real pleasure to be sharing this interview with him now.
James Machell
JM: What do you think makes a really great utopian story?
TE: I think a great utopian story realizes that a utopian world isn’t the end game in and of itself, and that it’s really just a launching pad for truly discovering the universe and examining the more subtle but powerful aspects of what makes us human. It doesn’t accomplish this the way most people seem to want, by tearing down the utopia and setting us back to the apocalyptic and imperfect world we live in today, but by saying “Okay, we’ve gotten past our worst, childlike instincts. Not suppressed or ignored them, but actually learned to deal with them in a healthy way. What next?” We can still find conflict, but we get to solving it the right way in the end. We learn, we grow, we discover new mysteries, and when conflict arises, we show how to navigate it in a healthy way, even if it might take a while to get there. I’d point to many classic Star Trek episodes, or James White’s Sector General novels, as some good examples.
JM: Can you take us through how Utopia Science Fiction Magazine has developed since it was founded in 2019?
TE: It’s developed quite a lot. It went from a single-person, token-paying small operation in 2019 to what it is today: a globally staffed, pro-paying magazine. It’s been quite a journey and I owe an awful lot to all the staff and volunteer readers who have joined us over the years to help progress us to where we are today. And we’re not done yet! Our hope, as always, is to increase readership and subscribers, which helps drive up the amount we can pay authors and artists. We’ve come a mighty long way and there’s further still to go!
JM: What drew you to publishing utopian writing?
TE: Chiefly a desire to move away from the (at the time) crushing amount of dystopian fiction out there. You know the phrase: “You are what you eat.” The same is true that “you are what you read.” If all you read is dark, gritty, disparaging, cynical things about the world then that’s how you start to view it and, at least at an unconscious level, how you begin to shape the world around you. It’s a cyclical pattern—people who see the world as apocalyptic are more likely to see the darker things and when those get more attention, they take over our worldview. For a real-life example, just look at the news cycle and see how that affects people’s worldview and mental health. We need to see the good, the hopeful, especially when things are at their darkest. We need to know that we can (and will) overcome this and this is what it’s going to look like at the end. And seeing Utopia as a beginning and not an end is important too. I think, with the arrival of all the cozy books coming out, more people are starting to realize this. I think in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, we’re mentioned as part of the solarpunk movement and hearing that is quite an honor.
JM: In addition to publishing science fiction stories, poetry, non-fiction, and art, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine also offers a critique service, helping budding writers to find their feet. You’ve also recently taught an Apex creative writing class. Can you describe your approach to assessing a piece of writing, and some of the suggestions you’re most likely to make?
TE: Let’s start off with assessment. When I look at a story there are a few things I’m really hoping to see before I go on to accept it. The first is: does the story grip me from the first paragraph? If I make it to the end of the first page and am not thoroughly engrossed with a story or character, I’ll usually pass on it. Second is pacing and momentum. If a story starts off strong, does it carry through the rest of the piece? Sometimes, for short pieces, I’ll read through it entirely, but for longer pieces, there’s a trick to use. In the well-written, well-structured story, you can read the first and last sentences in each paragraph without reading anything in the middle and still walk away with all the essential information you need for plot and story. If you do that and stumble or get confused, it means the story has pacing issues and depending on how far from the mark that goes, I may decide it requires more editing than any of us have time to do before the next issue and pass on it. Third is the ending. The last line a person writes is the single most important line they will write. It’s going to decide if the story stays in my memory, awakens that feeling of wonder, or simply fizzles into the frustrating silence of unfinished or underdeveloped potential. So, if it’s got a strong start and consistent pacing, but the ending is flat or leaves us in a rather dismal or dystopian way, I’m liable to pass on it. If I accept it and decide to work with the author to edit it into shape, there are a lot of suggestions I might make depending on what the piece needs. My goal is always to elevate the writer – to get them to perfect their craft a bit more, to push harder and write better by cutting out extraneous words, adding complexity to the themes and ideas, and really project their message out into the world.
JM: Roughly, what is the acceptance rate for stories submitted to Utopia Science Fiction Magazine?
TE: We receive hundreds upon hundreds of submissions in a given year and only publish a total of 15 to 20 stories in a given year. So, like all magazines, there’s a small acceptance rate based largely on limited space. We have to reject a lot of great stories just based on that alone.
JM: Utopia Science Fiction Magazine has recently published its Weird Science Fiction issue. What themes can we be on the lookout for in the future?
TE: We have the cozy issue in June, and August is always an ‘anything goes’ field where we try to publish the best of the best. Every June/July the editors of Utopia meet up and discuss what we want the themes for the next volume to be. There are always a lot of good ideas passed around, but only a few issues we publish. So, what’s on the horizon for next volume’s themes? You’ll just have to stay tuned!
JM: What are some of the books and stories you wish you could travel back in time and publish yourself?
TE: That is a very good question and one I’m not sure I can answer. There are a lot of stories I love, but I’m glad they’ve been published elsewhere. It gives us a chance to read them, to learn from them and push the envelope farther in terms of ideas, technique, etc. We have a part of our magazine called The Vault where every issue I go back and find some amazing, public domain, stories to publish. So, in essence, if there are stories I really love I can go back in time and publish them in this manner (after a very exhausting and extensive search for the public domain and copyright registrations).
JM: When you’re not at the helm of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, you’re running Castle Books & Tea. Can you tell us a bit about your life as a bookseller and are you offering any good deals on rare books at the moment?
TE: Castle Books and Tea was born out of a bizarre moment when I realized I had free time, and it felt so unnatural I panicked and decided to launch a side project. I’m happy to say I no longer have anything remotely considered free time anymore. But it’s a real passion project— one of our specialities is vintage science fiction books. I’ve been to a lot of places to stock books and bought some amazing collections from people to resell. We’ve had books signed by Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Roger Zelazny, and a lot more. It’s fun to track down some of the harder to find books too, like Soviet Sci-Fi or the novels of Clifford D. Simak. We usually have a big sale in May to celebrate our anniversary (this year is the start of our 5th) and a lot of small sales throughout the year.
JM: What are some of the tropes and subjects that you’d prefer that authors avoid in submissions?
TE: I have read far more books about robots, AI, etc. than I ever hoped could have existed. While we find things about these books to like, it’s an exhausted topic and I find myself preferring more novel ideas. Otherwise, it’s a lot of what other sci-fi magazines hope to avoid seeing. We’re particular in that we really don’t need to see any dystopian, post-apocalyptic, shoot-em-dead stories. As our name suggests, these types of stories really aren’t for us.
JM: Any tips for budding writers who’d like to make Utopia Science Fiction Magazine their first place of publication?
TE: Write every day and read every day. Read the stories you like and read them for technique, not just for story. Read what Utopia has published. A lot of them are available for free through our site, Medium, and Substack. Also don’t get discouraged. You will get rejected. A lot. But that’s all just practice for when you get accepted. And you will. Just keep improving your craft.
Tristan Evarts
Tristan Evarts is the editor-in-chief of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine and has been for the past seven years. He has a Bachelor’s in English and Philosophy with a specialization in creative writing and a Masters in Library and Information Science. When not editing, he is working at the library or at his bookshop, Castle Books and Tea, or growing his eclectic collection of books.
James Machell
James Machell is a British writer. He contributes to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and curates its Substack. He also serves as Outreach Manager for Utopia Science Fiction Magazine and was the 2025 Contest Chair for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Find him on Bluesky @jamesmachell.bsky.social or YouTube @Fell-Purpose.
I recently came across a most curious and unsettling pair of essays by Brian Aldiss that I am still trying to process, because they seem to strike against the very heart of science fiction literature, and even much of Aldiss’s own writing. “As far as we know, we are alone in a universe,” Aldiss points out in the second of these essays on the subject of aliens (Aldiss 1999, 340), and he is absolutely right. As far as we know.1 But although the jury is still out on the Big Question, in this essay Aldiss seems fervidly convinced that extraterrestrial sentience simply does not exist. When Aldiss argues “the case for mankind’s solitary state here [the universe], for which the evidence is plentiful” (Aldiss 1999, 334). He appears to accept an absence of evidence as evidence of absence, an extrapolative leap which defies logic and scientific method.
“There is no scientific evidence that [alien sentience exists], any more than there was ever any evidence for the long-held belief in spontaneous generation”2 (Aldiss 1999, 335), an unfair comparison, because spontaneous generation (the theory that living creatures could arise from nonliving matter—for example, that flies grow from rotting meat or that frogs grow from mud) was disproved by scientific evidence against it, a state of affairs that has not been reached regarding the existence or non-existence of sentient extraterrestrial life.
Still, anyone who believes in aliens absent any definite proof is misleading themselves, according to Aldiss. Such belief “represents a continuation of that venerable credulity” (Aldiss 1999, 340) that cursed our race with gods and monsters. Yet absent any definite proof that aliens do not and have never existed, Aldiss seems to be just as guilty of relying on a type of faith — just as “credulous” — in forming his conclusions.
Whatever the reasons for it, or the reasoning behind it, this personal disbelief in the existence of aliens is of little consequence to anyone but Aldiss himself. Of far greater import, however, and far more troubling to the science fiction genre, is an earlier essay in which Aldiss presents an overview of the development of the role and portrayal of sentient alien life in SF literature from its long pre-Campbellian days to the present, and an examination of the causes and effects of the debased and increasingly “monsterish” concept of aliens and what is alien (Aldiss 1996).
Adedapo Adeniyi (also goes by Dapo The Abstract) is a Nigerian artist working in literature, film and photography, music (DJ) as well as art curation and counterculture archiving. He expresses his art through abstract avant-garde sensibilities. His debut novel, Wanderer, is available in stores. You can read an excerpt of his novel below, courtesy of the author.
Chisom Umeh is a Nigerian fiction writer and poet. His short stories have been featured in Omenana, Apex, Clarkesworld, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2023, African Ghosts anthology, Isele, Mythaxis, Scifi Shorts, and elsewhere. His short story, “Ancestor’s Gift”, won the 2024 Tractor Beam short story contest. He was a finalist for the Seattle Worldcon Short Story Contest and is the winner of the 2025 Nommo Award for Best African Speculative Fiction Short Story.
Chisom, holding a copy of the Wanderer. Image: African Imaginary
Chisom: Hey Dapo.
Nice to have you do the interview.
I finished reading your novel Wanderer a couple of days ago, and I must say, the journey feels like one long dream. It’s a steady flow of alternating sentences and logic that sometimes contradict each other and yet, strangely enough, feels complete and cohesive. Can you tell me how you were able to keep the story you were trying to tell in focus, even while spinning such a wild tale?
Dapo: Thank you, Chisom. I’m excited to have this interview with you.
I want to start by saying the story mostly wrote itself; I was just a conduit. Most of this book was written in an automatist, stream-of-consciousness style. They were retellings of dreams, memories, and reality, and I wanted them to appear that way. I never lost sight of the story because I welcomed getting lost as I was writing it to find myself.
Chisom: Oh, that’s pretty interesting. To me, the novel reads like Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard crossed with Vajra Chandrasekera’s luminous prose. It definitely felt like older hands were guiding yours on the page. Were there literary influences you were channeling when writing the book?
Dapo: Yeah, I mean, I try to stay away from direct influences while I’m writing, and I didn’t read The Palmwine Drinkard until after I wrote Wanderer. I took influences more from films and cinematic sensibilities than literary, but in that regard, Borges, Philip K. Dick, Timothy Leary, André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors Of Perception, and my editor and friend, Manuel Marrero. I think these are the ones I can remember right now, plus I don’t want to go overboard. But these people and their works across surrealism, psychedelia, paranoid fiction, sci-fi, metafiction, and so on influenced me in many ways and were formative for how I approached writing and this book.
Chisom: It’s interesting that you mentioned Surrealist Manifesto, psychedelia, and paranoid fiction, because in an essay in Medium titled Abstractism Manifesto, you talked about how ‘abstractism’ is a term that subsumes all of these concepts and more. I like the way you explained it in the essay and how it relates to your work. But could you do a quick description of the term (abstractism) so we could understand it in relation to your work?
Dapo: Absolutely! So when I wrote the Abstractism Manifesto in early 2023, I defined it as being an amalgamation of solipsism, surrealism, psychedelia, subjective reality, and the physics of psychosis. I believe abstractism brings these concepts together to take reality and the world around us from a state of form to an abstract sensory state of formlessness, and that’s what I try to do with my work — the dissolution of some absolute real into an abstract cosmic real.
Chisom: In your experience as a filmmaker, what is the major difference between visual storytelling and written one? Do you prefer one medium over the other?
Dapo: I mean, writing is definitely cheaper. Making films is more expensive and taxing. I also think it’ll kill me faster so that might be why right now it excites me more than writing does. But, frankly, the major difference is the painting. With words, I’m guiding the readers’ imagination. At the end of the day, everyone will come out of it with different images. But with film, I have to literally represent those images on the screen. I’m doing the painting for the audience, they just have to watch and engage.
Chisom: Besides making movies, I know that you do some DJ work on the side. You had a collaboration with NTS, which is really great. How did that happen?
Dapo: Let me put it in context: I work with this new-age collective called Freewater, which was founded by my friends. I serve as its curator and co-director. Freewater secured a residency with NTS Radio, and since I also DJ, they featured one of my mixes as part of the collective. We’re having an underground, new wave music festival/concert on the 11th of December (I think the interview will be out after it?), and NTS is our major partner.
Chisom: That’s incredible, actually. So, does your music influence your writing in any way? Some writers like to curate playlists for particular writing projects. Something they listen to just to put themselves in the mood. Are you that kind of writer?
Dapo: Music definitely plays a huge part in my process. When I was writing Wanderer, all I listened to was shoegaze. I found a shoegaze playlist that had over a hundred songs and it was all I listened to while I slept and dreamt and while I wrote as well. I’ve been DJing for almost 2 years now, and it’s made me understand music as well as how different people interact with it. There are sensibilities of transience I borrowed from writing and translated to how I DJ.
Chisom: I kept wondering about the shoegaze reference when I was reading the book. Something told me there was more to it than just being an element in the story, and I’m glad you just confirmed that. Which brings me to your process with writing your stories and how you edit them. Do you edit while writing or after?
Dapo: Oh yeah, shoegaze has a very dreamlike, haze-inducing feeling and I wanted the book to feel like that. I do very minimal editing while writing. I finished the entire thing then read it over a couple of times before sending it to my editor, and we had this period of sending drafts back and forth and conversations on the subject matter.
But enough about me, I want to hear what type of music you listen to and how editing works for you. I mean, you just won the Nommo, haha.
Chisom: Oh, lol.
Well, I’m very mundane with my music. I don’t have any playlists or do any sort of curation. In fact, when I’m writing, I wouldn’t want to hear any music at all as it easily interferes with my thought processes and breaks my stream-of-consciousness, AKA “flow”. But when I do listen to music, outside writing, it’s very Davido and Asake and Victony, and whatever Dlala Thukzin just released. For edits, I can’t move forward with writing if I feel like there’s something wrong with a previous sentence. So I tinker with that till it feels fine to me. So we’re maybe kind of opposites on this.
Dapo: Correct me if I’m wrong but you seem like a very calculated writer. You’re delicate about detail, you’re careful. I think it’s beautiful. I wish I could be that type of writer. Like I said before (this may sound a little pretentious but I fully believe it), I don’t really do any writing, these things write themselves and use me as a conduit. I don’t know where they come from or where they are going or why; they come raw and I write in real time. My flow can be erratic most times.
Chisom: I like to think I have an eye for detail, but, trust me, I’m not really that meticulous. I know writers who would draw up elaborate plots that cover the first scene to the last, and fill up a board with sticky notes. Me? I mostly just sit down and write a story as it comes into my head. I think both our approaches are valid, so long as the outcome is something folks can read and enjoy. When I’m done writing and send the work out, that’s where my effort ends. But I’ve seen you go through hell and high water to publicize your book. And it has really paid off. Maybe that’s something you’d teach me someday?
Nardwuar holding a copy of Dapo’s first novel, Wanderer
Dapo: You’re amazing, so we’re kin.
Thank you, I think it’s been a learning curve. A lot of how this book has been handled is experimental, constantly trying to see how to reinvent whatever a rollout is supposed to be. Some days before the book came out I’d post videos of just my legs as I was walking around. Wandering, if you will. I made cards and handed out googly eyes. I’ve had readings and talks. I even had an abstractism lecture and played a psychedelic techno set. I keep thinking of ways to present a work of literature outside of just the confines of literature, especially as a multimedia artist. I look forward to reinterpreting the book and presenting it in so many other formats: photograph, sound, installation, you name it.
Chisom: Say I wanted to try my hand at writing abstractism, are you holding one of those lectures anytime soon?
Dapo: Hopefully sometime early next year. I’m working on writing another edition of the manifesto that’s more professional, but I think that through reading the manifesto that’s up right now, as well as Wanderer and some of my short stories, anyone could get the gist of what abstractism is.
What’s next for you now Chisom? In the world of African Speculative Fiction.
Chisom: For me, I’m also trying to piece together a collection of short stories that hopefully might be my debut in the book-publishing space. I want most of the stories in the collection to be centered around two themes, so that means I’m writing mostly new stories.
Anyway, it’s really been wonderful having this chat with you. I’m looking forward to reading more of your stuff in the future.
Dapo: Sending you love and the best of wishes Chisom, excited to see your collection. I’ll send you mine as it comes along. You’re a refreshing voice in the scene here.
Jean-Paul L. Garnier, ed. Wave IX. Joshua Tree, CA: Space Cowboy Books, 2024.
By Carter Kaplan
Wave IX
J.G. Ballard’s story “Studio 5, The Stars” appeared in Science Fantasy magazine in 1961. The story is set in “Vermilion Sands”, a desert art colony suggesting the post-war “hothouse” desert compounds created in the American Southwest by painters like Max Ernst and Georgia O’Keefe. In Ballard’s Vermillion Sands, art, artists, poetry and landscape blend in remarkable ways, and the possibility of elements of virtual reality appear to be an operative dynamic, though this possibility remains unexplained, or anyway is deliberately obscured to enhance the futuristic feel of the community, and as well represent the confusion that should properly attend a world that is in contact with computers, simulation, and muddled human perceptions. The setting is thus an opportune field for blending a broad—indeed unlimited—range of aesthetic figures and themes. The plot follows the adventures of Paul Ransom, editor of the poetry magazine Wave IX. He is beset by submissions of bad writing (fragments in the form of computer tapes are often floating through the sky above Vermilion Sands). The poetry is produced by computers styled as Verse Transcribers or VT’s. The stale submissions form a point of departure for exploring the subject of poor writing, and how the production of poor writing is driven by complacency, intellectual laziness, cliché, formulae, cultural homogenization, stale involvement, theoretical strictures, official channelings, academic repetition, market forces, fossilized traditions, and so on.
Jean-Paul L. Garnier, the editor of Wave IX the book before us, presented Ballard’s story to the contributors and asked for submissions. There were very little instructions; contributors were simply encouraged to follow their inspiration. A variety of graphic images, poems and fictions were submitted. Here is a review of these pieces, followed by suggestions for further exploration and discussion. I am a contributor to the project, as described below.
Henry Farrell teaches democracy and international affairs at Johns Hopkins University. Kim Stanley Robinson is a science fiction writer whose most recent novel is The Ministry for the Future. Their conversation took place in March 2023 at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, around Tor’s forthcoming June 2024 re-issue of Robinson’s 1984 novel, Icehenge.
HF – How did you come to write Icehenge?
KSR – When I was a kid I loved stories about archeology, including pseudo-archaeology. There were quite a few fake archaeologies about when people first got to the Americas – the Phoenicians; St. Brendan; the Welsh – I read all these with huge pleasure. Everybody got to America, it seemed. I was perhaps 10 or 12. Whether I was making any distinctions as to whether these were real or not, I’m not sure. I just loved them so much as stories.
One of the stories was about the Kensington Stone, which was discovered in Minnesota in 1898. A Swedish American farmer found a piece of stone, with runes carved onto it saying more or less ‘we’re out here, the natives are killing us, mother Mary save us.’ It’s actually quite moving as a prose poem or last testament. It was dated to 1362, and Hjalmar Holand, a scientist from Chicago, decided that this was a genuine stone and spent his career trying to find an expedition from that era that would explain it. He found that a pope of that time had asked the Danes to find out what had happened to the church in Greenland, and an expedition had gone off to do so, and never was heard of again. Hjalmar Holand said these people got to Greenland, found it abandoned, went up the Hudson Bay looking for the missing Greenlanders, then went up one of the rivers leading southwest, and in two weeks were in the middle of Minnesota, where the locals killed them with arrows.
You can still go to Kensington Minnesota, where there is a 10 ton, 20 foot high copy of the stone, which was just a little thing. The original stone was displayed in the Smithsonian for a while as evidence of Vikings in America, but many experts in runes were dubious from the start about the language on the stone. They thought it was all wrong, but Holand defended it until he died. A couple of years later, someone noticed that all the runes were multiples of one inch long, suggesting it had been carved with a one inch chisel. It turned out that the Swedish farmer who found it was a country intellectual, who wanted to bother the brains of the learned, as he once put it. He’s almost certainly the guy who did it. But since Holand had died, he didn’t see it being removed from the museum.
At that point I began to get interested in hoaxes as such. The Vinland map was thought to be a hoax, and then was thought to be real, and now we think it’s a hoax again. I was interested in how hoaxes got found out, what the methodologies are and so on. Then in the midst of my reading, they found a real Viking site in Newfoundland at L’Anse aux Meadows. At that point I was 11 years old, so that dates my reading of this stuff. The news was announced in National Geographic, and I was thrilled.
So, when I became a science fiction writer, I was wondering what kind of stories to tell. I was young, nothing in particular had happened to me, so I was often telling stories out of books. Then a friend sent me an article in Forbes magazine saying that we could live up to 500 years if we could repair our DNA when it got damaged. I thought, Wow, what if Hjalmar Holand had lived a little longer, and thus saw his entire life’s work knocked down like a house of cards—what would he have said? How would he have felt? And I thought that would make a story.
Have not many of us felt we have been living in a parallel universe since 2016? Brexit, Trump, QAnon, space billionaires, anti-vaxxers, AI deepfakes, microplastics, dashes for growth as the world burns, Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine…
Maybe the planet slipped through a portal when the Large Hadron Collider was switched on? Or maybe we just stepped into a Christopher Priest novel and we’ve been trying to get out ever since?
Chris was the master of the imperceptible reality shift. That moment when we slip into an alternate reality, and everything distorts around us, and we can’t find the way back, because we didn’t realise we’d stepped across a threshold until it was too late. But maybe there’s another way? Or a series of pathways? But which is the right one? Is there a right one?
Reading Chris’s fiction was to lose oneself. To experience the vertigo of existential angst. But not so much in the story itself. Of course it’s a fiction, we know that, this isn’t a novel by McEwan or Amis junior, we don’t need telling. No, the dread is not that this fiction is made up, but that it is one of many fictions, unfolding indefinitely around you. And then you’re lost, lost like the protagonist, gripping to the contours of reality as the map – very neatly, very expertly – is elegantly pocketed by the author.
We read, I read, Chris’s fiction precisely for that moment. The moment of deception. The moment we realise we have been deceived. And there’s no going back. We can only read on, not in hope of revelation, but in hope of understanding better the prestidigitation, the trick of it. Yes, the trick has been played, there’s no going back, but for every good magician there’s a willing assistant. So much better to be the sidekick, hand in glove, observing, participating, knowing the trick is always more than the trick itself.
That was Chris’s invitation to his readers. To step out of the stalls, out of the shadows, onto the stage, into the limelight. To tread the boards with the storyteller, the one who shapes meaning from thin air, to catch his words and handle them with care, to palm the key so that the illusionist can make his escape yet again. To trip the light fantastic together.
It’s an unnerving experience to begin with. But with practice confidence grows. Knowing, yes, you will be sawn in two. But knowing, yes, you will be made whole again. The trick, for there is a trick, is to trust to the tale. Just not the teller.
Smoke and mirrors? No, not quite. An author needs their assistant, the attentive reader. It’s a liberating, even democratising, experience. Night after night, book after book, the trick falls upon the author to perform. And the willing assistant is vital to that performance – they may not practise the trick, but how they conduct themselves, learning the cues, reading the signs, responding intuitively to what the maestro requires of them…
Yes, without an attentive assistant, there would be no performance at all. No trick, no magic, no wonder. Only a darkened theatre, a disgruntled audience, a critical floor manager picking over the discarded stubs. Yes, writers need readers to be more than just popcorn accessories.
Chris had the reputation of being an occasional curmudgeon. His blast at the 2012 Clarke Award shortlist was notorious, but when he won the BSFA Award for The Islanders (a brilliant book), he made light of the incident, declaring that the massed throng of voters should probably now resign. In company, he was a witty, generous man – numerous writers have, since his death, described the support he gave them; it’s just that he took the business of writing very seriously. And what he expected of himself, he hoped also of his readers. In that sense, he led by example.
Chris once remarked that he did not abandon SF but that SF abandoned him. His unexpected appearance in 1983 on the first of Granta’s lists of the best young British writers, alongside the likes of Amis, McEwan, Rushdie and Barnes, possibly looked to those within the genre as if he had found a door in the wall and sneaked into the sunnier climes of literary fiction. Far from it since Chris, a natural outlier, was never fully accepted there either. His receipt of both the World Fantasy Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Prestige (1995) suggests someone who straddled the worlds of mainstream and genre fiction or who benefitted from the dissolution of such distinctions. But equally it might suggest someone who could, by happenstance, appeal to demographics that would usually not see one another, like the obscure protagonists of The Glamour (1984). Like it or not, this was a writer who found their home in the margins, nibbling at the edges of what constituted the borderlines. It may not have been good for Chris’s bank balance, until Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Prestige in 2006, but it was this odd (shall we say ‘adjacent’?) cultural positioning that helped to generate one of the finest bodies of literature in the post-war period.
Chris did not outgrow SF; rather, he grew the genre so that it could encompass an author like himself, and by so doing, he inspired other writers, who did not emerge from the traditional magazine market, to create work in a speculative mode. His influence is apparent in writers like Nina Allan, Adam Roberts and Lavie Tidhar or last year’s Clarke Award winner, Ned Beauman. But, most of all, Chris grew a readership. By which I don’t only mean the dedicated fans who bought his work so that, although he never cracked the lucrative US market, Chris could go on producing fiction right up until the end. (In fact, the period from The Islanders [2011] to Airside [2023] possibly constitutes one of the most remarkable late runs of any major writer.) No, what I mean is that Chris helped to grow the kind of serious, attentive reader for science fiction which has meant that, over the last fifteen years, much of the most important contemporary fiction is to be found on the shortlists of the BSFA and Clarke Awards rather than the Man Booker. By taking the form seriously, and by encouraging others to do the same, Chris’s influence on what is now produced under the umbrella term of ‘SF’ is far greater than book sales can ever suggest. It is no coincidence that when Mark Fisher was looking for case studies for his influential thesis on the weird and the eerie, he chose Chris’s game-changing novel The Affirmation (1981).
When, at a reading at the University of Kent in 2011, I introduced Chris as Christopher, he stopped me and said, ‘No, Chris to my friends’. Reality contorted, in a single word, and I stumbled on because that’s what you have to do when inducted into Chris’s world. I was proud then, and I am proud now, to say that Chris Priest was my friend. Go on, you can still get to know him, read his books.
Nataliya Dovhopol, Natalia Matolinets, Iryna Hrabovska, Daria Piskozub and Svitlana Taratorina are five young, diverse Ukrainian women writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Not only is their fiction significant but they also have a YouTube channel “Фантастичні talk(s)/Fantastic talk(s)” (@fantalks) where they discuss the history and current state of Ukrainian fantastic literature and interview foreign writers. All are fluent and articulate in English. More importantly they are expressive in their understanding of their own work and the importance of Science Fiction and Fantasy in understanding real life. Their insights into their writing reveal how it fits into contemporary Ukrainian culture and literature. Their responses are often touching and even harrowing, considering the horrific war they are experiencing.
Note for the following that both Nataliya Dovhopol and Natalia Matolinets share the same first name, spelled the same in Ukrainian, but use different English spellings.
What themes and topics do you explore in your work?
Nataliya Dovhopol I combine my interests in local history, mythology, art history and cultural studies with my degree in Theory and History of Art. I consider my novels to be historical fantasy (To Find the Amazon’s Land, The Knight of the Drevlyanian Land and the Lady Eagle) and ethnic fantasy (Wandering Circus of the Silver Lady). I also explore urban fantasy and like to experiment with genres and topics to reveal unknown pages of Ukrainian history, but always in the context of the real world. As well, suffering a lack of coming-of-age stories in my childhood, I want today’s youngsters to easily find exciting books by Ukrainian authors.
Iryna Hrabovska I’ve written in many genres, including detective stories and adventure novels. But most of all I love researching history. My debut was the steampunk duology Leoburg mostly set in a world with an alternate European history. My new trilogy (The Crystal Castle) is a sword and sorcery fantasy based on the events of the Hundred Years’ War. I am particularly proud of my mystical story The Closest to Hell, about the disappearance of miners in one of the first mines in Donbas in the early 20th century. It’s based on historical material about the small mining town of Snizhne, where I was born, and I want Ukrainians to see the Donetsk region not only as a place of war but also as a place of beauty and fantasy.
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