IGMS Issue 49 (23 page)

Schoen
: I was born in Chicago, IL, the youngest of four children. My family moved to southern California when I was about 18 months old, and though I have extended family numbering at least 100 souls in the Midwest, I've scarcely any memory of any of them. Part of being the youngest meant that when my father worked at the swap meet -- which he did both days of every weekend -- I got tagged to go with him, which I did from age five to eighteen, freed from my indenture by the act of going off to university. The reason I mention this is because I started writing on those weekends. I remember buying endless spiral bound notebooks, a new one each weekend, and sitting on the gate of the van during the long day, writing stories that came into my head. This in turn led to me reading science fiction and fantasy as I grew up, and hanging out with people who wanted to talk about books. Somewhere in high school though, I somehow got distracted. My academic proficiencies landed me in the math/science track, and when I left high school my exposure to the vast humanity I'd observed during my years at the swap meet probably influenced my decision to study psychology. Fiction and writing never so much as popped up as a possibility.

Psychology gave way to linguistics, which in turn gave way to a hyphenated discipline of psycholinguistics and a year spent petitioning the university to let me design my own piecemeal major with half again as many courses as the standard ones. That led me to graduate work in cognitive psychology, a master's degree followed by a doctorate, and then ten years as a professor in my own right before one of my grad students lured me away to the private sector. 

I wrote off and on throughout college, but I started taking it seriously (i.e., trying to sell things) in grad school. I invented an atrocious pseudonym, because my department made it clear that "serious doctoral candidates did not write science fiction" (anecdotes of Isaac Asimov notwithstanding).

Fortunately, none of those stories sold, so the world never saw that pen name, and no, I'm not going to tell you now. Once I was off doing the professor thing I submitted stories under my own name, and the sales began, mostly to second- and third-tier markets that paid very little, but at least paid in coin rather than just copies or "exposure." An exception was a sale to
Analog
, which started my eligibility for the Campbell award and subsequent nomination. Other sales led to other magazines and anthologies, a Hugo nomination, and more recently three Nebula nominations. I've had five books published by small presses, and last month (from the perspective of when this interview will run) I've had my first book come out from one of the big New York presses.
Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard
 was published by Tor Books on the 29th of December.

Schweitzer
:  But you also have your own page in
Weird Pennsylvania
as the Klingon Guy. So what about this? How and why did you suddenly become one of the world's leading experts in Klingon?

Schoen
: I was teaching at a small liberal arts college in northern Illinois, and they'd had several years of declining enrollment. It got so bad that they decided they needed to cut four faculty lines, and I was the newest hire in the largest department on campus so my number was up. But in such situations in academia, you have a year as a lame duck, which is good because you need that long to reach out and try to find new employment. Once I'd sent off all my papers and applications, I needed something to distract myself from the weeks and months of waiting for the phone to ring, and someone handed me a copy of
The Klingon Dictionary
. I'd played a bit with Tolkien's languages as a teen, hanging out with older, college-age fans who got me interested in language and linguistics, and as I looked at Klingon I wondered who else out there might be playing with it, and how I might use my experience in academia to organize them into a sort of professional society with a journal and lo, I would have my distraction for a few months. Then the media found out what I was doing and the whole thing exploded. What was supposed to only last until I found a job (which I did, and why I landed in Philadelphia) has turned into 23 years of traveling the world and speaking at conventions and museums, publishing translations of Shakespeare and
The Tao Te Ching
 and
Gilgamesh
, editing a quarterly, peer-reviewed journal for 13 years, and ending up with three-and-a-half pages in
Weird Pennsylvania
. It's been a wild ride, and as you can imagine it has both helped and hindered my efforts as a professional author.

Schweitzer
: Do you ever get strange requests for your Klingon expertise? I read somewhere about a police department that wanted to keep a Klingon expert on call, just in case they ever dealt with a psychotic who only spoke Klingon …

Schoen
: Some of what you hear is apocryphal (no surprise), and some tame by compared to the reality. I've been asked for tattoo inscriptions (both in Romanized form and in Klingon script), wedding proposal and ceremonies, eulogies. There are organizations that exist to gather up translations of their respective target works, such as Sherlock Holmes stories or the Alice books, and both groups reach out to me every few years. I've been commissioned to provide translations of ad copy for everything from carpenters' tools to theme parks to DVD collections. In fact, one of the very first DVDs ever sold -- a collection of images of the Earth from space -- contacted me for Klingon rendering to be used on one of the alternate language captioning tracks. And of course, I get lots of translation requests for localization of software, both games and serious applications and developers' tools. It's... interesting.

Schweitzer
: So you were an overnight success after years of trying? What do you think caused the sudden breakthrough? I remember reading some of your stuff in a workshop and it was at first, if you don't mind my saying so, not very good. But then there were sudden and dramatic improvements. What had been undeveloped little snippets became full-blown stories with strong narrative, and you were on your way. I don't take any credit for this. So what happened?

Schoen
: My strength has always been in characterization and dialogue, but back in the day I couldn't recognize a decent plot if you dropped it into my arms. So what happened is I worked at it. And slowly over time and a lot of words written, I went from clueless to really bad to poor to mediocre to adequate. The big turning point for me was in 2010 when I went up the mountain and spent two weeks at Walter Jon Williams's master class, the Taos Toolbox. Walter is the master of plot, and he beat it into my head slowly and with great force and small words until I got it. Or at least, I had the beginnings of it. Like anything else in the business, it's an ongoing process. I'm very happy with the plotting of
Barsk
, but I'd do it differently now because the experience of writing that book has taught me even more and if I'm lucky the same thing will happen with the next one as well. We don't just learn from our mistakes, we learn from what we get right too. Or at least, that's how I think it's supposed to work.

Schweitzer
: Do you think it was an advantage that you got sidetracked into psychology and linguistics before going seriously into writing, in the sense it gave you more to write about? There have always been lots of SF writers who are professionals in some scientific field, who write on the side. I think of Gregory Benford, who is an astrophysicist, for example.

Schoen
: I have to think so. Back in my professoring days, I used to insist that my advisees take courses outside of psychology. They'd show up in my office the week before classes to get their proposed schedules approved and I'd look at the page of psych courses and nod and ask, "Where's your physics class? Where's your poetry class? Where's your foreign language/art history/philosophy/archaeology?" And the bewildered response would be "but I'm a psych major," and I'd look at them and say, "Psychology is the study of human behavior. Which of these other courses doesn't involve human behavior? You have the rest of your life to be a psychologist. Right now, while you're in school, sample the rest of human endeavor and it will inform what it means to be a psychologist. Nothing is wasted. Nothing!"

That applies to writing too. I don't regret the years spent pursuing an advanced degree or doing research in memory and language. All of it informs who I am as an author (though I do sigh sometimes when I see all the "young turks" coming up in the field and think maybe that could have been me if I hadn't been busy following an academic track -- but then that would have been a very different me).

I had a conversation with James Gunn some years back, after being a part of one of his two-week workshops. He'd gone through three of my stories with meticulous care, and at the end of the workshop I stopped in to ask him, one-on-one, if he thought I had a future as a writer. He pointed out that I was coming from a pretty unique perspective, that we had plenty of authors (as you've observed) with doctorates in the hard/physical sciences, but he couldn't think of anyone else with a background in cognitive psychology or psycholinguistics, and that would allow me to write things in a fresh voice. I like to think he had it right.

Schweitzer
: So what do you think are the most fruitful areas for speculative writing that other people are not exploring adequately? Surely the secret of being a successful writer is finding something compelling that other people are
not
writing about just now, rather than doing, say, the umpteen thousandth psi-powers story.

Schoen
: Call me crazy, but I believe that what makes a good story is that it connects on a human level, that the reader can relate to the experiences, motivations, and journeys of the characters. The speculative elements are misdirection that's used to distract you from what's really going on so that you can be blindsided by the meaning of the story. The classic example of this is the role of the alien in SF as a mirror of our own humanity (or lack thereof), allowing us to explore ideas that would hit too close to home if we openly admitted we were talking about ourselves.

The fruitful areas of speculative writing are NOT whatever flavor of the month allows you to connect with the reader, but rather the quality of the story you're telling. The genre (or sub-genre) that you're using is just a vehicle by which readers self-select where they're going to look for their next book, but Sturgeon's Revelation still applies: 90% of any of them will be crud, and I'm not the first to point out that Sturgeon was being an optimist. 

I'm reminded of my favorite quote from Freud (no, not the one about the cigar), which goes: "Analogies prove nothing, but they do make us feel at home." We like to read the things we're already comfortable with. It's why we love series, or media tie-in books of our favorite television shows. We're already comfy. And that's the time to tell a great story, when the reader's guard is down. 

But whether you're talking about shape-shifting paranormal romance, hard SF to the third decimal place, or talking animals in space, it's all just window dressing. A good story translates to any of these. Look at different genres' "adaptations" of Shakespeare, from
West Side Story
 to
Forbidden Planet. 

So, okay, I haven't really answered the question you asked, because I think it's the wrong question. Because I don't want fiction that's just about the tropes and the baggage and the symbols of a genre. What we're not exploring adequately are human questions. All that other stuff should exist as metaphor to let us talk about who we are, why we know joy and sorrow, how we treat one another so poorly and how we can aspire to change, grow, and achieve the potential of our best nature.

Or we can just have more car chases and explosions. But in space.

Schweitzer
: I would certainly agree that chasing the visible trend will never produce more than imitative work. The zeitgeist produced cyberpunk, i.e. the works of Gibson and Sterling. But there were also a lot of writers who read the works of Gibson & Sterling and said, "So this is what sells," and wrote some, and produced 2
^nd
-tier cyberpunk, imitations of what the originators had been doing a couple years earlier. I think we've seen this over and over again. So, does one watch the "market" at all while writing?

Schoen
: I don't think so; at least I don't watch it. Personally, I'd rather write what I'm feeling inspired to write, and then worry about whether I'm going to be able to sell it somewhere. In theory, good writing can always find a home. That said, I do seek out the advice of people with more experience in the field, such as my agent. Last year I sat in his office and we discussed several different projects that I had in mind and he offered input as to which of them he thought had the most promise, given the ever-evolving state of the market. I find this a nice compromise between following the market and following your bliss.

Schweitzer
: Let's talk about your work directly. You've got a lot of animal characters. Your new novel is about a post-human civilization inhabited entirely by genetically altered animals. What's the fascination here?

Schoen
: Great question, and it goes back to the problem of writing the Other and the SF problem of writing the Alien. I'm an over-educated, middle-aged, white male, which makes the first problem fraught with dangers of stereotyping and cultural appropriation, and these are real concerns, both socially and artistically. The problem of writing the Alien is that it's a lie; because if we write something that's truly alien the reader is going to find it difficult to apprehend any of it, let alone sympathize with the alien character. The solution, to make the Alien familiar in some way (and thus less alien) is a happy answer because the Alien is typically a metaphorical device for talking about ourselves anyway.

Which brings us to writing anthropomorphic characters. Whether you call them "Uplifted Animals" or "Raised Mammals" (the term I use in
Barsk
), the characters you create are a blend of both writing the Other and writing the Alien. When I'm crafting my Fant characters, I'm painting with both broad strokes and fine lines. At the base level I get to take the species-specific behaviors of elephants (everything from infrasonics, to the causal use of a prehensile trunk that's basically a third hand, to gender-based social structures) and map them on to behaviors that are traditionally considered and clearly identifiable as human. To the extent that my readers are familiar with elephants (or dogs, or sloths, or bears, etc.), they'll recognize the animal trait as it manifests in ordinary, everyday behavior, creating a wonderful dynamic of nonhuman characters that are nonetheless comfortable.