George Zebrowski Interview

Hello, George: many thanks for giving us some time here. Welcome to SFFWorld. I’m writing these questions as Open Road Media are releasing more of your older work in the USA as ebooks.

The latest to be released is In the Distance, and Ahead in Time, ten short stories including your first Nebula award finalist, “Heathen God.” Tell us a bit about the collection.

After the publication of my collection Swift Thoughts, by the fabulous Golden Gryphon Press, the heroic Martin Greenberg asked me if I had included all my available stories in that collection. I had not, so I quickly made this selection and sought a reuse of the Bob Eggleton painting from the magazine edition of the title story.

One reader asked me whether these were “leftovers,” but quickly added that he saw no drop in quality with the stories in Swift Thoughts. I had briefly thought that there might be, since there were two Nebula finalists in Swift Thoughts, but changed my mind upon rereading. After all, who am I? Just the author. You know the theory–the author is the last to know. I think it’s the publishers who are the last to know what goes on with an author’s readers, ignoring the fact that many books bought remain unread.

During 2014 you had nine older books released as e-books. How has the response been?

As Poul Anderson once said about his reviewers, “I have been worked over by experts.” It seems redundant to expect reviews of these e-editions, since the originals were “worked over” a long time ago, with reactions ranging from ignorant to vicious, to mostly very favorable. One magazine reviewer disliked several novels in a row, but later referred to them as “distinctive.” When I pointed out that he had not liked a one of them, he replied that maybe he had learned something.

Macrolife had at first split opinion down the middle, then was proclaimed a classic and “a cult novel” (by Stephen Baxter). Sales were less than 2,000 hardcovers US, but much larger in the many translations. It went from commercial failure to classic with nothing in between.

But since 2000, after Brute Orbits received the John W. Campbell Award for Best Novel, my reviews have run nine out of ten favorable. However, some seven years after publication, Brute Orbits was brutally maligned by a fan commentator, who said that the novel won its award only because the Campbell jury liked it. He then goes on to hide behind mere opinion while asking us to believe him, thus contradicting himself without a trace of shame over the lost logic.

However, here quoted to illustrate how little effect reviews, good or bad, have on sales, is Publishers Weekly’s take on Swift Thoughts:

“The 24 highly regarded stories of this brilliant collection span 30 years of John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner Zebrowski’s (Brute Orbits) career in fundamentally philosophical hard SF. Convinced that the genre best ‘rehearses possible futures,’ Zebrowski succinctly exhibits a wide range of gritty, postmodern, impeccably disciplined glimpses into futures far and near, as well as alternative histories, like the intriguing ‘Number of the Sand’ and ‘Let Time Shape’ from the History Machine series he began in the early 1970s. All probe the innermost reaches of human frailty. Like Kafka, Zebrowski follows each wrenching ‘what if’ opener with remorseless logic to a closing as stark and inevitable as the utter cold of outer space, often a direct result of humanity’s violent and spiritually fatal pursuit of power. Most disturbing are Nebula Award nominee ‘The Eichmann Variations,’ which questions whether that murderer is capable of remorse and redemption; ‘Bridge of Silence,’ an alien contact that cuts to the essence of human hubris; and the shattering ‘Lesser Beasts,’ which lays bare the tragic delusional aftermath of the Vietnam War. Humanity’s saving grace of humor, which the author sees as a weapon against totalitarianism, dominates ‘Stooges,’ an alien encounter via a comedy jam session. Though Zebrowski notes that several of his stories ‘got away’ from him, all demonstrate impressive discipline, logic and mastery of his craft; as his conclusion, ‘Holdouts,’ suggests, there is a human need to ‘rewrite reality itself.’ Few SF writers have done so with such mathematical elegance.”

Decades earlier, with such and later reviews, I might have expected editors to rush me with offers, but I have faced only amnesia. Really–with reviews like that? You won the JWC Award? Why don’t you speak up more for yourself!

Without sales, merit is marked worthless, which creates situations in which writers of merit don’t get published at all and are run off the corporate ranch. Why should a monied group of investors decide which authors will rise and which shall fall, Isaac Asimov once asked. “It’s their money, but our lives,” said Norman Spinrad. Look at those SF writers who are doing well, and some will tell you that they might lose everything in a single year, die of exhaustion from the “Cluster-F###k” rush for shelf-space, in Jon Stewart’s parlance. You’ll be told don’t write for money, which means many worthies won’t write at all. Yet the trap for profit from talent is always open, ready to spring shut. It’s a cultural contract, as an open publishers’ invitation to submit work, that is always being broken, and may well be a legal contract for future lawyers to explore.

Many of us know all this but don’t whine. Tough it out. Bend to the blackmail of silence. Fill your coffin of first editions and get out of the way. Didn’t you know that Hugos and Nebulas are for beginners? Merit? What’s that? Listen to the loudest voices.

Of the list currently on sale, have you got any particular personal favourites?

The question of personal favorites is impossible to answer, and implausible to confess to more than one or two. For most writers each work had certain individual problems to solve. The three parts of Macrolife are three snapshots out of 100 billion years. Any number of novels and stories can be set between the sections. Cave of Stars is one such moment, as is the long story, “In the Distance, And Ahead in Time,” and “Wayside World.” I started it all in this way, but the marketplace has in effect censored the writing. One sign of hope is the recent naming of Cave of Stars in Science Fiction, The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010, by Damien Broderick & Paul Di Filippo, in which each novel receives a substantial chapter of discussion along with perspectives on the author’s career. That’s as good a favorite as any–except my unpublished and struggling new novel, Invade the Night, about the plight of a defrocked physicist, accused of plagiarism, who believes that his scientific training should have something to do with life.

A few of my one hundred or more short stories I embrace for the way in which their particular problems were worked out in the writing. The enjoyment of writing must come first; publication is an afterthought. Tennessee Williams made that the primary goal of writing–God’s grant of a good morning’s work.

How comfortable are you generally with the reappearance of older work? Is it something you’re happy to do, reaching a potentially new, wider audience, or are they something you’ve moved on from?

I have to ask, what is it that is happening? Can we see and understand what is happening? On the one hand there is the question of merit. Readers and various editors consider these books worthy to one degree or another; corporations think merit is nice to have but profit will seek even the unworthy if earnings beckon. It has been said that no matter how worthy or worthless a book there will be readers who love it and those who hate it; and many more will have no opinion, even if they read it. Given these immeasurable gulfs, I believe that everything should be published and be available at every level of earnings, to face whatever shakeout of opinion may come. In my case, earnings have been from low to modest (typical midlist), while the praise, honors, and awards, handed to me have been large, along with some small doses of vitriol; but the major corporate publishers have found my sales wanting, merit be damned, and so have slowly fired me, with no appeal. Long broken, traditional publishing continues to limp along, struggling to fix horse races. To many of the best, corporate publishers have no answer beyond a few valiant efforts by serious editors, who know how to get fired.

Now we come to e-publishing and print-on-demand, where books can remain available at reduced earnings, which by the time an author reaches his last is really all that counts–short of burying a coffin of first editions instead of a body, or scattering ashes, imagining future lootings by collectors.

Moving on? You can’t help doing so, even while in the middle of one thing, I think of others. My files are full of memos and passages for stories and novels I may never finish.

In the last decade or so, I’ve written and published some poetry. These come as insistent thoughts, sometimes one a day, and must be written down. And I take time to write short-shorts, a forgotten form in SF, for Nature. A new one is just out, written in angelic prose rarely noted by SF reviewers.

I am comforted by the e-editions of my complete backlist, especially by the survival of the original cover art, which I arranged with the artists. Please note that my e-books also appear in Britain’s SF Gateway, at www.sfgateway.com.

You wrote The Sunspacers Trilogy at a time when YA literature, at least within the Science Fiction genre wasn’t very popular. How was that experience?

My YA editor gradually accepted the fact that the best YA was also read by adults, but despaired of reaching young readers unfamiliar with SF. Robert Heinlein and I discussed the problem when I told him that I was beginning to write YA novels. Surprised, he asked me why I wanted to do so, and I said because I had grown up reading his. There shouldn’t be such thing, he answered, only novels with young people in them. Anything else is a manufactured thing. He cited Lord of the Flies by William Golding, and repeated that YA should not exist, especially in SF. We have better luck selling “targeted” YA SF these days, but it goes for complex reasons often removed from their merits as novels or as SF.

I gave up writing YA after my third contracted novel was turned away, despite high praise for Sunspacer and The Stars Will Speak, professedly for editorial reasons but really for low earnings of the previous two. And my editor disgraced herself when I caught her in a fib–she had never read much Heinlein but claimed to know the tradition I was evoking. Eventually, I placed Behind the Stars as a magazine serial, and another house picked up my trio of YA books for a beautiful adult trade paperback, for a handsome sum. But still my sales were not impressive, mired in a business model that did not care for merit outside sales and did little to help those sales. Note that publishers never blame themselves for an author’s poor sales but take all the credit when sales are good. Remember, the publisher controls nearly all the methods and means of sale.

So that was my YA experience. Heinlein said it best: challenge young readers early with adult work.

Thinking back, how did you start writing? Was there a particular book or moment in your life that spurred you on?

I was moved by J. G. Ballard’s work, especially “The Garden of Time,” a short story, which I tried to imitate. I remember talking with John W. Campbell after he rejected a story of mine in the early 1960s, noting that he praised its thought. My first novel, which became The Omega Point Trilogy, echoes Verne’s Captain Nemo, A. E. van Vogt, Charles L. Harness, and Alexander Dumas via Alfred Bester–and philosophical ideas out of Schopenhauer and Teilhard de Chardin, few of these ideas believed by me any more than Clarke does in Childhood’s End.

I refer the reader to the afterword I wrote to the 1983 edition of The Omega Point Trilogy, which describes the personal complexities of my writing this book. A new print trade paperback edition has just been published by Armchair Fiction, with the original Bob Pepper wraparound art, at www.armchairfiction.com.

What is it with the Science Fiction genre you find fascinating?

Science fiction began as a sport among various serious novelists of the 19th century, and gradually both its sensational and critical possibilities grew and became a genre, spurred in part by H. G. Wells’s ideas in his essay “The Discovery of the Future.” We see an inherently serious and critical way of fiction gradually succumbing to ever cheaper forms of adventure fiction, leading to the question, how did an inherently critical literature get demoted to formula genre entertainments, when its intrinsic possibilities have helped change the world and promises to make SF our universal planetary literature? The answer is money. In the 1970s serious SF writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Bishop, George Alec Effinger, Howard Waldrop, Joanna Russ, Stanislaw Lem, James Morrow, Ian Watson and others hoped that the struggle to raise SF’s literary standards had been won. Then came STAR WARS in 1977, eclipsing even 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and infecting the commerce of print SF. The Omega Point, in its middle part in 1972, was maligned in Locus for having so much seriousness in it, improper for a space opera, and my name was repeatedly misspelled. This kind of attack followed me to 1979’s Macrolife, despite the efforts of Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Bishop, Gregory Benford, Howard Waldrop, Brian Aldiss, Ian Watson, and many others.

SF should be itself, filled with story and thought.

Extended life, Artificial Intelligence, there are so many things that only years ago seemed like Science Fiction. Do you think we will come to a stage where we could doom ourselves in some way or another?

If you mean can humanity destroy itself–then yes; if you mean can SF doom itself, also yes. All of Wells’s best novels are critically dystopian, following Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Even Jules Verne grew more critical of progress as the 20th century loomed, but his publisher downplayed that critical bent, interfering with the manuscript of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to a degree still waiting to be revealed.

SF’s greatness lies in the pendulum swing between utopian and dystopian visions, and its decline threatens with a stoppage of the pendulum at whatever point between the extremes, and ultimately at each extreme. That is the fascination of SF’s method, and in its drawing on the knowledge of the times, which today has outstripped most SF. It has been said that there seems to be more science fiction in the sciences and in the renaissance of science writing than in published SF.

Undoubtedly, the science fiction field is a genre that has grown in style, maturity and complexity over the years. Do you find yourself still reading for entertainment much? Or do you tend to read away from the genre?

All of SF’s best writers read away from the genre. I read entertainment SF somewhat, past and present, for its spurts of vitality and for what it reveals of its times. I like to read work that I would not write, even junk, and call it a guilty pleasure, because it fails less often in what it tries to be. Old junk is better at this, as in the Professor Jameson series by Neil R. Jones, once a major writer in the field. Donald A. Wollheim once expressed his liking for what he called “Vernian SF,” whose quality was vibrancy, which he found in old SF, and in Brian Aldiss as well, but he also liked Wellsian seriousness. Again, keep in mind the pendulum.

Note that older SF is not immature, or lacking in style. This is especially true of the 1950s.

There are great ones who are rarely mentioned today, among them John Taine, for his Before The Dawn and The Time Stream; Murray Leinster, for his “Sidewise In Time,” long before physics picked up the idea. Olaf Stapledon’s extreme science fiction, for his Last and First Men, which becomes a footnote in The Star Maker. I should mention William Hope Hodgson, and J. Leslie Mitchell, both great writers. The rise of H. P. Lovecraft as a science and science fiction writer is a hopeful sign.

Amnesia and ignorance are the two diseases that rule what is left of the SF community, and saddest of all are influences picked up by new writers and the movies with no idea of where they came from. If SF is doomed, then few may know that it has happened. The e-book backlists might be the way out of a memory black hole.

And what of newer authors? Are there any personal favourites?

Lately, I’ve been trying to catch up on works I have neglected, from the first half of the 20th century. I’ve been surprised by many of my fellow toilers who confess to not having read many “basic” works of SF. This is akin to cellists or violinists, or pianists, who confess ignorance of the greatest works written for their “instrument.” Elgar wrote a mighty cello concerto, and today we find both SF writers and editors who profess proud ignorance and uncaring for SF’s history. I am also somewhat guilty of this.

But I admire Robert J. Sawyer, Robert Charles Wilson, Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, the large body of Michael Bishop’s works, especially Count Geiger’s Blues, Eleanor Arnason’s novels and stories, Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, for his avoidance of trivialities, Joan Slonczewski’s novels, genuine SF all, Howard Waldrop and Bradley Denton, national treasures both. Too many writers are ignored by the corporates, whose editors should be shamed and driven out of town. SF as a category was created by its writer-editors, who are now gone, or powerless before the bean counters, who as the late great Lucius Shepard remarked are bent on training “craft morons” among the struggling writers.

What do you enjoy about writing short stories?

I enjoy the craft challenge, which has dos and don’ts, which have been demonstrated by people of genius, much of it outside SF. I strive to spy what a story in progress should turn out to be, and often find out in draft hindsights.

SF keeps short fiction alive, which is closest to poetry in its discipline.

Right now I have more than a dozen stories in progress, tasking me to live up to a dozen years of past efforts.

Six of these are in Nature online, others in Ian Whates’s Solaris Rising 3, Paradox, World Literature Today, the Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Interzone, and in an upcoming Analog.

Do you have a process you follow when creating short stories? Does a well-formed idea come to you and you just polish it, or do you spend a long time maturing ideas and mixing them together until you find something that clicks?

They don’t so much click as whisper. I keep a day book, where I write down titles that hope for stories. Ideas go into files and linger for my attention, until they win out, or don’t. I write by hand and on a computer, as the whim moves me.

Would you care to pass on any advice to writers starting out? What was the best advice you were ever given when starting out?

Learn to write every day, anything, and the pages will increase. Learn this so you can’t help but do it. Done well enough you’ll become Mickey Mouse in the animation of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”–unable to stop the brooms from bringing the buckets of water. But that’s good for a writer; you’ll fill up your life. Write “The Messiah” in ten days, or at least “The Water Music.”

Be a person on whom nothing is lost. Make a story out of anything. Memorize On Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande, which helps you to think about things you need to consider before you can benefit from technical advice. Workshoppers don’t know this. They put the cart before the horse, so to speak, and hope to avoid consensus fiction. Do not converge; diverge from your fellow toilers. This takes more isolation and contentiousness than most people can bear.

How are you finding the ebook revolution? Are you happy with an ereader these days, or do you still prefer “treebooks?”

I like both, and the idea of both. Where would my backlist be without e-books? And all my color covers are still there!

And, in 2015? What are your aspirations today?

To finish the short stories still hanging on the edge of my inner cliff. To publish more poetry out of the thousand handwritten pages I have not yet tested on knowing eyes; to do several more novels in the Macrolife Mosaic, and to finish my novel trilogy (not SF), of which Invade The Night exists, and Measure The Shadows, and Ill With Enemies, all of which await an editor with eyes.

Over all this loom the black wings of Forced Memories, which doesn’t know how or what to be, but is being blurted out in strange ways.

Once again, thank you very much for your time.

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