ALLEN STEELE

Interviewed by Steven H Silver

At Windycon XXV, Steven H Silver had the chance to sit down with guest of honor Allen Steele and discuss his books, small presses and winning two Hugo Awards. Allen Steele is the author of nine novels and two and a half short story collections, the half being the one which will be published in a couple of months by Meisha Merlin Press called Sex and Violence in Zero-G. He specializes in writing stories set in the near future, so far in near Earth space, although he has gone as far afield as Mars, the asteroid belt and Jupiter.

In your novels and short stories, you indicate you are a fan of Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. Your second novel is called Clarke County, Space in tribute to Clarke. Are there any other authors or specific books which you feel are seminal works of science fiction?

Well, the ones that I particularly remember, the ones the really affected me during that so-called golden age of SF when you are twelve, perhaps as late as fifteen, are the entire Ace Science Fiction Special series, along with Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions. The problem with a general list of seminal books is that it changes all the time, and it seems to always reflect what's been published in the last ten years. You see on the internet the so-called 100 best science fiction books and it seems like it goes only so far back as Neuromancer, with a couple of older books, like Childhood's End. Which bothers me quite a bit because there were books that were generally influential to the entire history of the field. I'm not talking about obscure books, I'm talking about novels like The Space Merchants and I, Robot which almost seem to be on the verge of becoming forgotten. In some ways, I think this is because we have a new readership which has been attracted by the newer books and they don't really know the older books are out there, but it's also the fault of the publishers who have not kept these classics in print. But on the other hand, because SF is a constantly evolving genre, some things get lost to obscurity. So is there a seminal list? I think it almost depends on the particular reader in a way. What they like and what their tastes are. I know what is seminal to me and what I enjoy, but to someone else, they might have a completely different list.

Do you still read SF in your free time? If so, what current authors are you reading?

When I'm writing a novel, I can't read a novel. I find myself almost incapable of doing so. So I read principally short fiction, particularly Asimov's and Analog. And right now that really is the cutting edge, I think, in science fiction. A novel in SF unfortunately has become rather conservative. There are a lot of trilogies and on-going series, and it's hard to find a book that is not only self-contained, but also strikingly original. There's two or three novels written in the last year or so that I have read which I enjoyed a great deal. Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace, Michael Swanwick's Jack Faust and Alex Jablokov's Deepdrive... I enjoyed the hell out of those three. But where I find the most satisfaction is from picking up the magazines and reading the short fiction. There's a group of authors who have been coming up in the last decade who are part of the new hard SF group, who are quietly leading the revolution. They're really re-inventing hard SF. I like to think that I'm one of these guys. I count among them Stephen Baxter and Paul J. McAuley... those two immediately come to mind, but there's others.

All of your early novels are set in the same universe. You have several short stories set in the same universe. Do you see that as an on-going place to put stories or do you think that at some point in the future you are going to close it down?

I've already announced publicly that I'm closing it down. The last story I wrote in Near Space is the one coming out in the next issue of Asimov's, "The Exile of Evening Star" (Asimov's, 1/99), which is the sequel to "The Death of Captain Future." And that tied up the last loose ends as far as I was concerned. I reached a conscious decision to close down Near Space last year after I attempted to write a sequel to A King of Infinite Space and it fell apart. It really gave me a lot of heartache and trouble because this book seemed so obvious and almost easy to write, and yet I couldn't bring myself to go further than fifty pages. It threw me into a block, in fact, for five or six weeks, which I didn't break until I came to Windycon last year and Saturday night in the hotel room began writing a completely different short story. I came to the conclusion that I had said everything I wanted to say in this particular series. I covered all the thematic bases, I had done everything I really wanted to do and if I went any further, I would begin to repeat myself. You really don't want to do that. I think one of the problems with the on-going series in SF is at some point or another a writer can begin to can repetitious. The stories may sell well and the publishers may want more, but the readers are probably getting pretty dissatisfied with a lot of this and thinking "Geez, why didn't he quit earlier?" It's probably because nobody told the writer to stop. The writer's got to cut himself off. So I figured that five novels and fifteen short stories were enough. Let's put it away and go somewhere else.

One of your early short stories was "Red Planet Blues," which was later expanded to form the basis for part of your novel Labyrinth of Night. When did you realize you were going to do an expansion of the story?

That was a very tricky one. "Red Planet Blues" was originally supposed to be a novel. In fact, it was originally supposed to be my second novel, but I wrote about a hundred pages of it and it collapsed. It seems that half the time I start a novel, it collapses before 100 pages, and that's what happened in this case. So I started writing what was really my second novel, Clarke County, Space, yet I still had the idea kicking around in my head, so at one point, I stopped work on Clarke County, Space and wrote "Red Planet Blues" so I could use up the core idea. Several years later, after I had written not only Clarke County, Space but also Lunar Descent, I went back to "Red Planet Blues" and said, "okay, well, maybe we can expand it back out into a novel again." But the problem I ran into was that some of the things I had put into the novella had already become dated, chiefly the fact that in "Red Planet Blues" there was still a Soviet Union as a major plot plot. So I had to reinvent things and so forth. I'm not sure the expansion was entirely successful as a result. I think its a good novel, but I think there are a couple of flaws in it.

In Labyrinth of Night, you introduced an extinct alien civilization, but you never really followed up, in that or subsequent works, with the impact that had on humans?

Another problem I had with Labyrinth of Night was the reception of it. Labyrinth of Night had to do with the "face" on Mars. I first got the idea for using the "face" on Mars as the springboard for a science fiction novel after I read an article about it in Analog that was written by Richard Hoagland. Analog is usually a fairly trustworthy source for science articles, but by the time the novel came out, the "face" on Mars had graduated to the pages of the Weekly World News. Not only that, but after the novel came out, I started getting letters from the UFO buffs and pseudo-scientific types who thought that I had some kind of inside word on this things. I've had people come up to me at conventions and they have the "inside dope" on these things. It was all very X-Files. "Meet me tonight at 10:00 and I'll show you the secret government files on this." I thought "Oh no. I really don't want to keep going through this." I feel like one of the problems with Labyrinth of Night is that I might have inadvertently fed something, even though I said at the beginning of the book that I don't really believe that the "face" on Mars is actually there. I had a lot of people write me e-mail when the photographs showed that that particular land form had eroded away leaving only a vestige of what it had been asking if I was disappointed and I thought, no, I'm happy as hell we've got it settled. It's all done with. Not only that, but there's no possibility of a sequel now. So that's why I never went back to it. The cooties themselves, the aliens, I thought were very interesting and I sort of want to do something with them, but you can't do that without approaching the whole Cydonia artifact issue again, and I really have no desire to do so.

In your fiction in general, you really don't deal with alien life forms. Do you have any plans to or is that something you aren't interested in?

My instinct as a writer is to zig when everyone else zags. Right now, I think that aliens are overdone in science fiction. Everyone in the world is doing aliens, both successfully and unsuccessfully. That's one of the reasons why. It's just an instinctive thing. I may do ETs at some point. In fact, I have an interesting race in the back of my mind that I might do something with very soon. But I'm really principally interested in the human condition. In particular the human condition on the frontier. If there's only one theme that runs through my work, it's how people react to strange situations. Particularly the so-called common man, the ordinary man, and how he would react to living on Mars or the bottom of the ocean or a number of different places. That's much more interesting to me than the rubber-faced alien.

You've now won two Hugo Awards for "...Where Angels Fear to Tread" and "The Death of Captain Future." At what point did you realize there might be something special about either one of those works? Was it when you were writing them that you got the feeling you were doing something different or was it when you got that phone call saying, "You've been nominated for a Nebula, nominated for a Hugo, nominated for a Locus." and so forth?

For a while, in the early-mid nineties, I was despairing because I was getting absolutely no award nominations whatsoever. Every single year, all my friends were getting nominated. Every single year they were receiving awards and at best I was getting an honorable mention with the Hugos. I think I was trying a little too hard to write Hugo-winning stories. It was around '94 or '95 when I said, "Oh screw it, just write what you want to write. Don't worry about the awards, don't worry about the critics, just do it." I wrote "The Death of Captain Future," and when I looked at it, I thought, "Well, this is a solid story, and some people are going to like it, but it's not going to be an award winner." So I was absolutely, utterly astonished when I got e-mail from the awards committee telling me that I got two nominations that year. One was "The Death of Captain Future" and the other was "The Good Rat." And indeed, I went in to the Hugo Awards ceremony five months later dressed to lose. I really thought that James Patrick Kelly was going to take it for "Think Like a Dinosaur" and that Ursula K. Le Guin was going to take it with "Forgiveness Day." Sure enough, Jim Kelly took it with "Think Like a Dinosaur."I had even told Jim the day before, "You're going to get it, and don't worry about it, because I have no hard feelings whatsoever." So I couldn't have been more surprised when it was announced that "The Death of Captain Future" won for Best Novella. I went on stage and gave... well, a fairly memorable acceptance speech. And that was okay, it was my Hugo and its pretty cool. Now I was Hugo Award-winning writer, I thought I'd probably never get nominated again. I'd live Robert Silverberg's curse of getting one fairly early in his career, then getting nominated over and over again over the years and watching other guys take it away. But then, two years later when it happened again with "...Where Angels Fear to Tread," it was exactly the same situation. I finished the novella and thought it was good, strong work, but no award-winner. And it not only took the Hugo, but I won Asimov's Reader's Poll for the first time with that one. It also received the Locus poll award and was nominated for the Nebulas. So, I think it was a basically a matter of stopping being self-conscious about my work and getting over Hugo envy, such as it were.

Now both Hugo winners have five word titles. Is that going to be a trend that continues?

I hadn't even noticed that. Geez, you're right. So in other words, the next one... (Allen counts the words in the title of his next story). Well... you're right. I mean the next novella I have coming out is "The Exile of Evening Star" and that's five words. Published in Asimov's, too. We'll have to see. I hadn't thought of that. Holy Smokes, I hadn't realized I had done that.

"The Death of Captain Future," was adapted for an audio performance by Seeing Eye Theater. How active were you in the adaptation and production?

I wrote the first draft of the radio play, and it was the first time I had ever done anything like that. I did it pretty much verbatim from the original novella, full of flashbacks and so forth. I thought it worked okay, but Brian Smith, who produced it, thought it was unwieldy for audio adaptation. He wanted me to do a re-write, but by the time we got around to that stage, I was already involved in another project. So I said, "Brian, look, why don't you go ahead and do the second draft," and I handed it over to him. So he did the second draft, and he basically took the meat of that first draft and adapted it, excising the flashbacks except at the very beginning, which sets the stage, and did it in much more of a straight-forward presentation. It works pretty well. It has some things in there which are not in the original story, some of which I added, some of which he added. There are a couple of things I wish could have gone in there. I was using audio cues for the flashbacks, so I wanted to have electric rock. In fact, I specified that they use Quick Silver Messenger Service's "Who Do You Love," which is one of the great long rock pieces. 23 minutes long, absolutely spooky as hell. Brian took that out and inserted instead 40s style space opera type music, which was different but I thought it worked real well. I was really thrilled to find out that Marina Sirtis was going to be the lead actress in the thing and I thought her performance was very good... utterly convincing, absolutely marvelous. It's really very good and I'm very proud of it.

Have you gotten any feedback? I tried to download it the other day. It is two parts, thirty minutes each part, which takes longer with internet congestion and feedback times and so on, but I understand it's going to be released on audio tape.

It sounds better in stereo. They sent me an advance copy of the tape and I listened to it on the headphones and you get the real stereo effect. But I haven't really gotten any response. There were a few notes posted on the Sci-Fi Channel website, but they were mostly the "Marina Sirtis hubba-hubba" sort of thing. Not very much of that was concerned with the actual content.

You have written several alternate history stories. In the title of Tranquillity Alternative, why two "L"s?

That's the way it is on the map. That was one of the things that Ace's copy writers queried me about. It's a weird damn thing, but tranquility in the dictionary is spelled with one "L" but if you go and take a look at the lunar map, it has two "L"s. This is something we had to go back and take a look at. I guess whoever made the original maps of the Moon mis-spelled it and the spelling stuck.

Are you planning on setting stories in that same alternate history or have you said what you have to say there?

It's pretty much all said and done. I've done what I wanted to do. There's one more story that's been kicking around in my mind that I would like to do, but again, you have to wonder, does the audience really want another end of the cold war story? I was thinking about writing a prequel to it, about the alternate mission to Mars, but then Steve Baxter went and did Voyage, and I was actually kind of grateful when he did it because I thought "Good, I don't have to write this story, I can just read it, instead." There's a lot I can still play with, though, so I'm not going to shut the door on that idea entirely.

All of your novels have come out from major publishers: Ace, Harper and your next novel will be coming from Ace again. But all of your collections have originally come from small presses, first Old Earth Press and now Meisha Merlin. Did you specifically set out to place the collections with small presses?

I very specifically went out of my way to find small press publishers because, unfortunately, the short story collection has become virtually extinct from major publishers. Very few of the big-time publishers will touch a single author collection. It's the every-book-a-bestseller mentality that is persistent within publishing right now, which is why the SF small press has been able to flourish. There are still enough readers out there to make these books profitable if you aren't dedicated to making them bestsellers, or even to making a huge profit. With Old Earth Books, Mike Walsh, the publisher, was thinking about starting up a publishing company at the very same time I walked right up to him and said, "Do you happen to know of any small press publishers who would be interesting in this type of thing?" The first books did very, very well. Ace reprinted both of those, but the Ace edition of Rude Astronauts, the first one, has already gone OP (out-of-print), while Mike is still selling copies of his edition. The Ace edition of All-American Alien Boy is still in book stores, but when it eventually goes OP, Mike will still be selling copies of All-American Alien Boy. Nobody among the major publishers has offered to buy Sex and Violence in Zero-G. In fact, I'm kind of disinclined to let them. I'd like to let the Meisha Merlin edition have a lot of room to breathe. The nice thing about working with small presses is that you have a lot more flexibility than you do with the major publishers. You get input with them that you just don't have working for a very large publishing firm. With Sex & Violence in Zero-G, I was able to specify the artist. I always wanted to work with Ron Miller on something, and they were only too happy to get Ron to do the artwork. Literally in five minutes we decided, during the telephone call, to expand the book to being a collection of the ten most recent near-space stories to being the complete near-space stories, throwing in the five stories that had previously been in Rude Astronauts. I said, "I think it's a great idea, but we've got to clear it with Mike Walsh, see if he has any problems since Rude Astronauts is still out there." Steve [Pagel] said he would get back to me on it. He hung up the telephone and five minutes later he called back to say that Mike said it was fine. In small press, you have that ability, that flexibility, to do things like that. The same decision would have taken months if it had been done through a major publisher. It will be interesting to see if the science fiction small press is successful with original novels. Nobody has really tried it yet, although they've done reprints of older work. I think Meisha Merlin may be trying something in that direction in the near future. In the mainstream, it certainly has been successful. A couple of years ago, Atlantic Monthly Press put out the novel Cold Mountain by Charles Frasier, which went on to hit the New York Times Bestseller list and receive the National Book Award. I think its time for someone in the SF field to try the same thing, but it's a matter of who's going to take the plunge first.

You've taken part in several on-line chats with Cybling.com. What do you get out of the chats? Are they just a chance to push your books? Are they an extension of conventions?

For one thing, I'm just intrigued with the media. The first couple of times I did it with Jan [Murphy of Cybling.com], it was a weird thing because it was having a conversation with the eyes and fingers instead of just your mouth, and it was kind of strange. Of course, there's the chance to push the books and do that kind of PR work. I've always really liked meeting with my readers and getting their feedback. I think it's necessary to do so. I don't think a writer should live a cloistered existence. I know some people who do, and I also know writers who have absolute and utter contempt for their audience. I certainly don't. If there's a chance to go out in any way possible and rub shoulders with people who read my books and perhaps get some feedback, then I take it. In fact, that's sort of how I got over Hugo envy. I thought, "I'm not getting any awards, but I've got some loyal readers out there. They seem to be growing, so don't worry about it." This is what I got from chats and conventions and elsewhere. But the chats are also interesting because of the medium you're dealing with. Scrolling type running down the screen. Even in an unmoderated chat, with people throwing questions at you two or three times a minute, it's like juggling and you're trying to keep up with it. The only thing that ever bothers me is when you're kicked out of your own chat, which is what happened to me one time. Somebody had just asked me an important question and all of a sudden the computer completely threw me out. I had to call for my wife, who's really the computer expert in our household, and have her come in and do a complete re-boot to get back into the room. I was thinking, "Oh, God. These people probably think I've snubbed them." But when I came back in, it turned out that everyone in the room had figured out what had happened and they were all sort of patiently waiting for me. They were also talking among themselves. So the medium is fascinating. The only thing I wish that could be improved is that sometimes I wish I could have a microphone and a voice-recognition system, because the hands begin to wear out after an hour or two.

What would you like to tell us about your next book?

Oceanspace is a departure. It's an undersea adventure novel that takes place in the twenty-first century. I'm trying to write a state-of-the-art undersea book. In a way, I'm kind of doing with this novel what I did ten years ago with Orbital Decay. That is, taking a look at the current state of technology and working from that. The other thing I tried to do is write an undersea book which doesn't have the conventions of other undersea novels in SF. There's no domed cities, there's no bio-engineered mermen, there's no nuclear war on the surface which means that only the guys on the ocean floor have survived. There's no giant squid, although I do have a sea serpent in there. In some ways its an homage to what I think is still the best undersea SF novel ever written, Arthur C. Clarke's The Deep Range. I just finished it, and it's now in the re-write stage, and dispassionately speaking as much as I can, I think its a pretty good, solid adventure story. I hope people like it when it comes out. Its coming out from Ace Books, but they've just agreed to buy it so we'll have to see when it comes out.

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