The Writer's Hot Seat: James Patrick Kelly
James Patrick Kelly has wonthe Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. His newest project is Kingof the Dogs, Queen of the Cats, a short novel from SubterraneanPress. His second most recent publication is the collection, ThePromise of Space, published in 2018 from PrimeBooks. His novel Mother Go was an Audible Original in 2017. In 2016, Centipede Press published acareer retrospective in its Masters of Science Fiction series entitled JamesPatrick Kelly, Master of Science Fiction. He has published over a hundredstories and his fiction has been translated into eighteen languages. With JohnKessel he is co-editor of Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology, Kafkaesque: Stories Inspired by Franz Kafka, The Secret History Of Science Fiction, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology and Rewired: The Post CyberpunkAnthology. He writes a column on theinternet for Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and recently retired fromfaculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University ofSouthern Maine where he taught for fifteen years.
One of our fiction readers,Jess Flarity, had the chance to ask him some questions over Zoom about hisprocess, the pandemic, and other topics. The interview took place on October25, 2020. This interview has been transcribed and edited.
Flarity:Howhas the pandemic affected your daily or weekly writing routines? Do you feellike you're producing more or less content since March?
Kelly: There are two answersto that. As the pandemic started to rage I was very put off my game. I continueto still watch too much CNN and read TheNew York Times too assiduously. In the immediate aftermath I was like manyof my friends who were saying, “Oh my god, I can’t write,” but then... therewas nothing else to do. There were no trips to take or other distractions. Ihad been putting off working on a novel that I’d been working on for over adecade... and kicking off since April until now I’m fairly satisfied with myproduction. I’ve certainly hit my average production over the last four or fivemonths.
Flarity:Whatare you reading at the moment (fiction, nonfiction)? Do you find it influencingyour own work, or do you keep your personal reading and professional writingseparate?
Kelly: I don’t usually readin the traditional sense as much as I used to, which is to say, look at a bunchof marks on a bunch of molecules and read them with my eyes. Most of mypleasure reading is now audio. I listen to books. I was an early adopter andinvestor in Audible.com, and one of the best things that ever happened to me iswhen Amazon bought Audible and changed all of my stock over, but I’m still in avery sweet grandfather deal with two books a month. Recently, my friends wererecommending me this book called ThursdayMurder Club by Richard Osman. One of the downsides of being a professionalwriter is that it’s really hard to read in your genre and not critique as youread—it’s more difficult to enter the “dream” of the story... so I’ve beenreading a lot of mystery lately. ThursdayMurder Club is a “cozy,” a story in which amateurs solve a murder andthey’re often quirky, and because the Brits were the originators of this genre,often the characters are British, and so this book is about a bunch of peoplein a retirement home who solve murders. It’s well-written, but some parts are alittle “twee” for me.
I’m reading a lot of detective stuff becausemy current work-in-progress is a science fiction detective novel. I’ve writtentwo novellas set in this world (the Fay Hardaway sequence)... and I’m notembarrassed to say this whole project in some ways is an homage to RaymondChandler. I’m pretty complete on Chandler, all the books, all the stories,several biographies and essays, and I was looking for pleasure reading in theChandler-esque style, so I picked up Ross Macdonald, who was hailed as “thenext Chandler”... and now I’m pretty complete on early to middle Macdonald, atleast listening to it. The one thing I read recently that took me totally bysurprise and is one of my favorite books in the last six months was True Grit by Charles Portis. What awonderful book... it really is an American classic—charming, gritty, andrealistic.
Flarity: More process questions: what does your writing desk look like? And what's your go-to writing drink and snack?
(Kelly pulls his camera off of his computer screen and points it at his desk, revealing a rather Spartan set-up with a wireless keyboard and mouse, a “banker’s lamp,” a modest monitor and set of speakers, and a couple of plain white coffee mugs, one of which sits on a warming disc. The background wall is painted in a shade of soft green like forest undergrowth. A window above the desk lets in natural light.)
Kelly: A desk is where youlook while you’re thinking... you can see all the coffee mugs, which answersone of your questions—I caffeinate regularly. The rest of my office here is wayneater than normal only because I’ve been teaching an online class, so I had tomake my office look like a professional person’s office. I have the great fortuneto have my office in a separate building from my house. I have a detachedgarage and my office is in the attic there, so when I leave the house in themorning, my wife, who is retired, lives in the house while I live up here. Wehave lunch together and then I come down at the end of the day, but unless herhair is on fire, we don’t get together. Sometimes we’ll just text each otherrather than trying to talk to each other. Before we moved here, I just had aroom in the house where we lived in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and that wasfine, but it was too... accessible.
Flarity:Yourcolumn in Asimov's ScienceFiction magazine covers a wide rangeof topics, with last month's focusing on subliminal (click the link) messagesand the unconscious. Do you come up with a few different ideas before finallydeciding what to write about? What's your strategy here?
Kelly: My strategy changedover time. When I started writing this column, I did not take it over—Iactually proposed it to the editors of Asimov’sin an online forum. I suggested that they hire my friend Bruce Sterling as acolumnist to cover the internet, and a couple of days later Sheila Williamscalled up and said, “We want you to do it,” and I hadn’t been thinking ofmyself. So, when I started, one of the main topics was looking at the internetas a shiny new gadget we could play with. Many of my early columns were aboutsubjects like, “well, there’s a really interesting website about robots overhere...” but in the same column I’d be linking to a website about the greatestfantasy novels and space pictures from NASA, so the column would end up being amish-mash of links.
I thought that I would end up running out ofthings to write about (I’ve been at it for fifteen years), but I ended upsettling on more focused columns about Mars or the moon, and later on I startedtalking about the trends... and thinking about the last five columns, I wroteone about science fiction mysteries that is going to come out very shortly.Before that I was focused on copyright—or copy-left, or copy-wrong, however youwant to talk about it—since I’ve been a creative commons advocate from veryearly on, so I wrote a column about that and how copyright has changed. I wrotea column about theories of humor... then I did one on using the suffix “-punk”as a means for discussing new movements in the field—and ended up talking abouthope-punk, which meant the next column was going to be about apocalypticscience fiction. Sometimes one column points to the next column, and sometimesit’s about stuff from the news. It’s often about the way technology will changeour world and it’s sometimes connected to the stories I’m writing. I wrote ajoke column about comparing pictures of dogs and cats on the internet, and thatgave me the idea for the novella I published in February, King of the Dogs, Queen of the Cats.
Flarity:Whichstory of yours would you like to see made into a feature-length film? Animated,or live-action? Any dream directors or actors in mind?
Kelly: This is a thing thatmy fellow writers and I talk about sometimes in workshops. To some extent it’sa way of talking about what a story is about—is this a Spielberg or a Fincheror what is it? But to me this is kind of a mug's game: there’s a vanishinglysmall chance that these dreams or aspirations will happen. I have been at this(Jim’s voice changes sinisterly and includes an echo) many decades, many decades... and I have oneIMDB credit for “Think Like a Dinosaur.” That was a total coincidence,basically, that it got made into an episode of The Outer Limits, and my experience there was about what Iexpected. It was some very nice money—but not life-changing money. There was achance I could have written the script but I thought they might make me changethe ending, so I took the money and ran.
I think it’s crazy to write a screenplay—acrazy waste of time. It would be helpful if it was trying to improve thefiction, but your chances of selling a feature-length screenplay are about thesame as getting hit by a meteor. If you have a burning chance to see your workdramatized, write a play! You can probably get a play produced, but ascreenplay? Your chances are less than zero. Having said all that, I think mynovella Burn would make a good movieonly because it could be shot mostly on Earth in a bucolic country setting.Similarly, I wrote this long novelette called “The Rose Witch,” which is set inHungary, but it could be shot anywhere. It’s a medieval setting, so you’d needto build some carts and find a ruined castle, but it could be done relativelyon the cheap. But a book set in space? The set design and cost of everything isastonishing... if you could imagine somebody ponying up $150,000, maybe an indieproducer could get one of those made, but my novel Mother Go is set across the solar system and couldn’t be made forless than tens of millions of dollars, which is very difficult money to comeby.
Flarity:Didyou happen to see the Chinese blockbuster, TheWandering Earth? What is it about Chinese science fiction in particularthat gives it appeal to an audience here in the U.S.?
Kelly: The Wandering Earth ranks up there as one of the most profitablemovies of all time, so the fact that people don’t know about it is interesting.On the other hand, I found it beautiful to look at but pretty ridiculous. It’seye candy. It’s no worse than the big-budget blockbusters that come out fromthe United States, like Interstellar orAd Astra, which are hugedisappointments once you sit through them, even if you’re thinking in themoment, “Wow, that’s really what a black hole would look like!” The problem isthat when you have a hundred million dollar budget, they have to spend a lot ofmoney on CGI and also play it conservatively and not make the movie too hard tograsp so they can make their money back. In TheWandering Earth, it teeters on the edge of sentimentality and falls overthe edge again and again... and there are some oddball problems of physics andtechnology that make it so that it doesn’t bear close scrutiny... but theChinese are very proud of this movie.
One of the things that strikes me is thatChinese science fiction started around the same time as Western sciencefiction, around the year 1900. Lao She wrote a book about a cat planet, forexample. Before the cultural revolution, a lot of science fiction was state-sponsored,so a lot of what got printed celebrated state values, but after the revolutionthere was a real flourishing of science fiction writers who found clever andinteresting ways of saying what they wanted to say without offending anyauthorities. The 500-lb gorilla of Chinese science fiction is Liu Cixin, whowrote the script for The Wandering Earth(no offense, but I just didn’t like it), and also The Three-Body Problem, which comments on the cultural revolutionin a negative way. There’s a story I’ve heard that the American translator, KenLiu, moved the cultural critique from the middle of the book to the verybeginning, which made it very attractive to the American culture because we’retrying to understand the world and other dominant cultures. China is a dominantculture, and so they have a different way to look at the world that we live in.
I went to a Chinese science fiction conventionin Beijing last year as a guest, and unlike American conventions, where writersand publishers talk about their works, in this convention, state officials gotup and talked about the science fiction economy. How much money the gamingaspect is making, movies, television, and publishing—as if they were manufacturing science fiction andreporting on how that sector of the economy was doing. It was a totallydifferent kind of look and feel. In the U.S., science fiction is a very, verysmall part of the economy, and while it is the same in China, it’s looked on asbeing more prestigious, and I think that’s a big difference.
Flarity:Youmention in your afternote in The Promiseof Space that your stories are featuring more heroine protagonists, and youstated in your first short story collection in 1990 that feminism might be themost important contribution of the 20th century to the future—more so than anytechnological achievement. What do you think has been a major victory in thefield of science fiction for women in the past thirty years, and where arewomen still "losing the battle," so to speak?
Kelly: I don’t know if womenare losing the battle anymore. There are two ways to look at this: who’sgetting the honor, and who’s getting paid? In both cases, women are doing verywell. If you look at the last couple of Nebula ballots, every category was wonby women. When I was coming up, I was in a generation with wonderful writerslike Karen Joy Fowler, Connie Willis, and Nancy Kress, and there was this idea amongthe men like, “they’re just as good as us,” even if it was very much dominatedby men. In later generations there’s Nalo Hopkinson, Jo Walton, Kij Johnson, NnediOkorafor, N.K. Jemisin, Charlie Jane Anders... and not only are they winningawards, they’re racking up pretty amazing sales. I have a lot of contact withup-and-coming writers, and when I look at writers like Sarah Pinsker and A. T. Greenblatt,both of whom just recently won Nebulas... there are more fine women writersthan there are men. The other part of that is the editorial class now beingmore than half women, so they’ve been doing very well.
For me, I can now write about women. If youcan imagine this, back in the day, it was sort of a problem to have a femaleprotagonist. Guys in the fifties didn’t want to read about women spacecaptains. But now we can write about women or all kinds of different people andhave the science fiction writers view this as a plus, which is a big changeover the last fifty years or so.
Flarity:Endingon a pandemic note—you attend at least a couple of science fiction and writingconferences every year, Readercon, Boskone, ICFA, etc. Do you find the factthat we all have to attend virtually a little bittersweet as a science fictionwriter? Have you Zoomed into a conference yet, or does becoming a digitalapparition simply not have the same appeal?
Kelly: I have mixed feelings about this.Personally, I would have loved going to the Nebulas and I’m going to missBoskone and Readercon. I’m not sure I would have gone to Worldcon in NewZealand—it’s a far trip—but there’s a point to be made there: a lot of peoplecouldn’t afford to go to the Worldcon in New Zealand. For better or worse,these window-based or Zoom-based interactions are science fiction becomingreality, in the same way that people thought, “Oh no, should I write an emailor send a letter through the post?” There’s a question of accessibility here. Ifeel for the fact that I can’t drive an hour to see a convention, but I don’tnecessarily regret the idea that people from all over the world can now go toWorldcon.
About a month ago, a friend of mine, an Italian science fiction writer, created a Worldcon that was really a Worldcon: it had people from thirty-five different countries and it was not totally dominated by Americans. There was equal representation across many different countries. There were panels about Latin-American science fiction writers and Southeast Asian science fiction writers who could possibly have never made it to Worldcon. There’s a thing you do lose—the casual conversation—but I’m hoping there’s a technological solution. The price we’re paying for the safety of Zooming is not a total negative, it has its pluses. It’s one of those things where in twenty years people might be saying, “I can’t believe people used to get on a plane just to go to Los Angeles for the weekend. Didn’t they realize how wasteful that is? My god, the pollution, and the new Zoom+Zoom is so much better than actually being there in person…”
I think we will look back as these old habits as not only being quaint, but part of the destructive ethos of our generation.