Gil Roth talks with Diana Renn about her new YA novel, Tokyo Heist, then has a long conversation with science fiction writer/critic Paul Di Filippo about what it's like to be a Steampunk icon, how to make it as a writer, and Before Watchmen.
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 2, Episode 8 - Manga-loids and Steampunks
(upbeat music) - Welcome to the July episode of The Virtual Memory Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and I have survived the Fourth of July action. In my case, Fourth of July action means staying in, avoiding crowds and tossing a dog bed into our guest bedroom, 'cause one of my Greyhounds freaks out and hides once the neighborhood fireworks start up. And in the middle of June, I went to Boston for the annual bio conference. It's part of the rotation of trade shows I cover every year for my job. The show went fine, but who cares about that? I think one of the worst moments in man's history was the first time a guy ever griped about his job to somebody else, so I'm not gonna bore you with that stuff. But anyway, since it's not easy to get people to come to the wilds of Northern New Jersey for a podcast conversation, since I still have some trepidation about recording Skype interviews, I figured I'd set up some sessions for the trip. The day before the conference, I stayed with my friends Paul de Philipo and Deborah Newton in Providence, Rhode Island. I met them in 2000, back in my book publishing days. Paul had requested a review copy of a book I'd put out by Samuel Delaney. I remembered his name from a science fiction collection I'd read years earlier, and we struck up a friendship from there and stayed pals ever since. And during my visit, they took me to meet their pal Don de Massa in Eastern Providence. And Don has what's believed to be the largest personal collection of science fiction in North America, or the second largest. All I remember is Paul said there are 70,000 volumes in the collection, and when they took me to the converted and expanded garage it holds it all. I figured that number might be just about right. I took a couple of pics of the place, but I was up on a step ladder and there's no way to really capture it all. It's a pretty amazing stash is what I'm saying. At one point, Paul noticed we were in the anthology section. So I asked Don if he had a copy of Mirror Shades, the Cyberpunk collection that Bruce Sterling edited back in the '80s. Of course, he knew exactly where it was and pulled it off the shelf for us. I told Paul that this book had the first story of his that I'd ever read, and I got him to post for a picture with it. And you know, if I hadn't read that story back then and held on to Paul's name, I don't think I'd have sent him more than, you know, a thank you and a review copy of the Delaney book back in 2000. It's funny how much books mean to us. I mean, I remember buying that collection in a Walden books at the Granite Run Mall in Media, Pennsylvania. And I say A Walden books because that mall actually contained two Walden bookstores. I never learned why. Now you're lucky to find a single bookstore in any mall. (upbeat music) ♪ I've been working on my rewrite ♪ ♪ That's right ♪ ♪ I'm gonna change the ending ♪ ♪ Go throw away my title ♪ ♪ And toss it in the trash ♪ ♪ Every minute after midnight ♪ - My first guest on this episode is Diana Ren. Diana and I attended Hampshire College together and reconnected on Facebook a few years ago where all souls eventually converge. She lives in Boston now and since her first novel is just published, as in it came out a few days earlier, I thought we should sit down and talk about her arc of writing and publishing. Her novel is a young adult thriller called Tokyo Heist, published by Viking. I read the first 60 pages last night and I actually thought it was pretty well written and more sophisticated than I expected, frankly. And keep in mind, I have no background in the YA genre, so I had no idea what to expect in either in terms of writing style or content. But I'm pleased to say I'll have a lot more faith in that generation of kids if this is the sort of novel that they read. You can find Tokyo Heist on Amazon or Barnes & Noble in either print or e-reader format. If you wanna support your local indie bookstore, you could order it from them. In fact, why don't you do that? Here's my conversation with Diana Ren. Already in progress. ♪ Just working over here at this room ♪ - You know, once I finally started to settle down, I was like, I just, I can't do this. I'll just be a dilettante instead, which I think suits me, frankly, I don't know. So anyway, my guest is Diana Ren, yet another friend of mine from college because I pursue that sort of guest list and interview list based on people I know as opposed to people I've never actually had a conversation with, although you and I didn't talk too much in college. - I'd be in a class together, maybe. - Yeah, probably one of the, well, with us, it's all literature. Maybe that Melville and Dickens or Dostoevsky and Tolstoy or- - I know he had a Russian class who may have been in that, and there was something with, I think, Lee Heller or somebody. - Yeah, yeah, Lee had the Melville and Dickens. - That's it, yeah. - You know, representative men as things have to be known. - I conveniently forgot a lot of it. - Yeah, much of Hampshire, even though I did no drugs during my Hampshire period, I've managed to forget a good deal of, you know, what went down. - You're the only other person who's done no drugs in Hampshire. You're kidding me. - I spent a semester at Tulane and didn't drink either. I really kept picking the wrong places from my habits. I guess a seminary would have made more sense, except, you know, I'm a Jew. But anyway, congratulations. - Thank you. - You have your first book out. So what did it feel like having, being able to see your first book on the shelf? - It's surreal because I only saw it on a shelf for the first time the other day. I mean, it's like that brand new. So, you know, I went there with my husband to Barnes and Noble. We looked on the shelf and we're expecting not to see it 'cause I'm so used to not seeing it. And then suddenly it jumped out and it was under new teen reads and it was right there at eye level. So that was a thrill. - Yeah, so tell us about the book. It's called Tokyo Heist. Tell me about the plot. Tell me about what went into it. - Okay, it's a young adult book, which means really anybody in this day and age, everybody's reading YA, but it's marketed as 12 and higher. - No vampires though. - No vampires though. - No really, not we can come back to that. But technically it's a vampire free book and it's an art mystery. It's an international intrigue story about a 16 year old girl from Seattle who is a big manga fan. She loves Japanese comics. She is drawing her own graphic novel in her spare time, The Adventures of Kamono Girl. And she's a very visual person and she's the daughter of an artist who is just starting to come into his own with his career. He's a painter in Seattle. And his newest clients are a Japanese couple who have just had some Van Gogh drawings stolen from their home and there's a corresponding painting at large as well. And she gets drawn into this huge art mystery for various reasons, feels that she must take this on herself and solve it, so. - What were your literary inspirations on the one side and your manga inspirations on the other? - Literary inspirations, that's a hard question because it wasn't always a YA book. It started out as an adult, very serious artsy kind of novel. And I think I was reading a lot of books about art and artists when I first began this in 2004. And one of the adult fiction writers that really inspired me was Anne Patchett in her book, Belkanto. I don't know if you've read that, but wonderful book. And she has a character, a Japanese businessman who's in Peru on business and he has a very compartmentalized life, but his great passion is opera and there's a famous opera singer who will be singing at this function in Peru. And so he's terrorists come into the scene and there's a whole lot of other mishap that follows that has nothing to do with that. But I just love this character so much. I was really interested in this businessman who had this great passion for art. And so one of my characters sort of owes a debt to Anne Patchett's character. And in terms of other literary influences, I think it is more manga and comics that influenced it because at a point when I decided this was really for young adults and I ditched the serious older narrator and I went with this younger voice, I did start looking a lot at comics in manga in particular. And there were some titles that were sort of about average students who were artistically gifted and had great ability to save the world through art in one way or another, either going into a painting or drawing something that was very perceptive or understanding something about art. So I kind of gravitated toward those titles. - Okay, the only manga I've had in the association with for years now was Cromarti High School, which I'm gonna guess you have no exposure to it, would be radically different than anything you mentioned. I'll send you some copies at some point. They're just a frightening and strange read. Now, we talked a few months ago, you've mentioned coming to comics late in your life. I was raised on comics as a child basically, or raised myself on them. What was that process like for you? How did that path start? How did you discover them? - You know, I was thinking about how I phrased that and I think it's a little inaccurate. I think I came to appreciate comics late. But my life is kind of framed, my writing life is framed by comics in a way because some of the first things that I remember reading were comic books. I remember I had a great uncle who had what I thought was a comic bookshop and they also sold candy. Well, it turns out, no, he was a pharmacist. That was his pharmacy, but he happened to sell all these comics. And so he was near my dentist and every time I went there, I would get my big pile of comics. And my mother also grew up going to that store and getting comics from the store. And so I grew up with this sort of pile of hers and mine mushed together and tried to draw my own. And then somewhere in elementary school just dropped it and forgot about it. And high school didn't think about comics at all. I didn't have friends who were into that. And then in college, my summer and winter job, going back to Seattle, was working at a bookstore. This was a husband and wife-owned business. And they also owned a comic bookshop down the hall. This is at Pike Place Market in Seattle. They owned a very famous bookstore/comic bookstore called Golden Age Collectibles. And they sold lots of actual Golden Age comics and movie, memorabilia, and all kinds of stuff. So the bookstore that I worked at closed and actually merged with the store down the hall. And I was very disgruntled. And I saw myself as this sort of refugee from the bookstore. And I was brought down to, I thought, shepherd the books that came with us and the reduced selection of books that came with us. And I was kind of into my English major snobbery at the time. And so I didn't really-- I never graduated, frankly, but go on. I've held on to that. Yeah, from the snobbery. Yeah, that's just remained all my life. Well, good. I didn't think that I was interested in them. But the fact is, when you have a 30-minute lunch break, comics are really convenient. And so I did start seeing what was strewn around in the desk in the back office. And I did start reading them. And there was some manga coming in in the early 1990s, not a lot, not in translation so much, not like it is today. But we did sell some. I looked at some that was not translated. We sold anime films that I think were bootleg videos, because they were at these funny yellow covers and handwritten titles. And they were not translated or dubbed some of them. So I started becoming interested more in the Japanese aesthetic, but I didn't really know what I was reading or watching. And I kept it kind of quiet. I don't think I pursued it. It was just stuff I looked at when I was in the store. And then flash forward all these years later. And I'm looking at my mess of a serious literary novel. But I know I have this character in her youth, liked comics, and I decided just to ditch the serious stuff and think about that more. And all of these memories of my past experiences with comics and selling them and being around them started to come back. And I went into comic bookshops later in life and into borders, which had great graphic novel sections. And huge manga, yeah, and just tried to understand what had been published since then and why people liked it, and why my students, I was teaching at the time, why my students were surreptitiously reading the stuff in the back of the room. And I just came to appreciate sequential art and how it really requires a different kind of literacy and its own challenges. It's not always easy to follow. And I still haven't figured out, am I looking at something that's badly drawn and badly written? Or am I just not at the level of understanding this type of sequence? Yeah, you know what I mean, like quick cuts or jump cuts or certain with manga. There's a lot of symbolism that is specific to manga that you may not know as a Westerner. And certainly, if you read Scott McCloud's understanding comics, you get very distinct ideas about how they transition that are very different than the West. Yeah, that was a big influence. I did read that book. Yeah, that I think came out during our Hampshire years as a matter of fact. Oh, did it. See, I wouldn't have known then. And then later, I did discover it. As comics geek that I am. But I guess that's the question of how did it evolve into a YA novel? Well, I had an adult narrator who was kind of serious and looking back on happier times in her life. And it was one of these dual narrative structures. Here's a chapter in the present with the older person. Here's the flashback chapter. That's a really hard structure to maintain because it's like writing two books, and they're competing with each other. And I've read very few books that actually pull that off. And I had given drafts of this to my writing group, and they were just not engaged by the present day, older narrator. And I wasn't either. And I started to hear that younger voice more like a radio signal or something. And I thought I would pay attention to it. And that voice was set in the past, more in the '80s and '90s. And I thought it doesn't have to really be there. There's nothing really specific to her experience then that requires it to be set then. Let's shift it to the present day. Suddenly, I'm in YA land. Because really, if you have a narrator who's young, and it's the present day, and she is not looking back and reflecting, there's no distance-- Great knowledge store here. Yeah, I mean, it's just here and now. I thought this is, I think, YA. And I hadn't read a lot of it. But that was probably a good thing, because I didn't get tripped up on that. Again, hence, not vampires. Right, right. Kind of. What does Japan mean to you? Yeah, so my character is a big Japan file, as a lot of manga fans are. And I grew up in Seattle, which has a lot of Japanese culture. And I remember learning the cherry blossom song in school, Sakura, and I don't remember our state song, which I think we learned. But I remember all the words to Sakura. And my dad had an office in what's called the International District, which is actually where old Japan town was located. And so there were always Japanese restaurants around and just sort of a sense of that history. And so just growing up there, I think I was always interested in Japan, because there were so many Japanese import shops and Japanese American students at our schools and exchange students. And it was just something that I was exposed to pretty early. And then when I was teaching English as a second language, I had a lot of Japanese students and became more interested in the country. And then my husband and I went to Japan in 2004. And that was a really transformative trip, because I didn't take a notebook or anything. I just sort of was immersed in the culture for three weeks and trying to see everything that I could. And it wasn't until I got home that I just started pouring out on the page all the things that had struck me. And so I think really it was a long gradual process of being interested in Japan, but that trip in particular, where I was around the art that I loved and just aspects of the culture that I had heard about but hadn't experienced that made me think, I have to write something set here. I have to get my characters to this country in some way. - How did the ESL job sort of affect how you write? I mean, given the amount of thinking you have to do about the language and how you would explain our language to someone else, did you find that at all affecting your writing assets of being too grammatically perfect or sort of having to step back and not letting it affect it? - Yeah, not really. I think if anything it gave me an understanding, 'cause I'd worked with so many Japanese students, I could kind of understand the cadence of a Japanese native speaking English. And so I don't have a lot of characters speaking, very imperfect English, but there are little trips and catches that even very proficient speakers of English who are from Japan, little mistakes that they'll make. And so I was able to include some of those nuances, I think because of my exposure to those students. But I didn't write in a kind of simplified way, if you will, I think, is that what you're getting out of it? - Just wondering about it too formally specific, not regarding whether it's YA or not, but simply the more we study the language, the more we can occasionally get tripped up in the grammatical structures of what we have as opposed to letting things flow more naturally. Not regarding the Japanese aspect, so much as just writing yourself or writing a voice and just making sure that the day's lessons aren't kind of sticking in your head. - No, that's such an interesting question. - Yeah, I'm full of those. But they're really meta sort of questions that have no easy answer and tend to trip up everyone. - Well, I mean, I was teaching composition and intro to lit and other things too, so I didn't work exclusively with ESL students. And I also did textbook writing and multimedia type of writing videos and things for ESL learners. And the big goal of that is to sound natural, right, to get them away from that stilted grammar book feel of English, and there's been a movement away from that for some time, so it never really occurred to me. I think if anything, I try to be clear because of working with non-native speakers, so maybe that's actually a failing in my writing that I try to maybe over explain or say things three different ways when one would do. That's one of my pet peeves, so. - We have to ask 'cause you have a first novel out working on a second. - Yes, yes. - Can you tell us anything about it or is this one of those, most writers are nervous about that? - Well, I'll say that Tokyo High sold as a standalone novel, so the first thing people ask is is there a sequel and I don't know. I have another idea I might want to explore, but at the moment, the next novel would be another YA mystery, but not necessarily a direct sequel to this. It's set partly in South America, so it's a really different venue, very different type of character, very different young sleuth. Violet in Tokyo Heist is really visual and is always trying to make sense of her life experience and also the clues to this mystery through her art, through writing it out as a manga and writing it sequentially and drawing it, and this type of sleuth would never do that. She's very different. - That's about all I can say, 'cause... - Don't give away too much. - It's yeah, I'm in the middle. - Yeah, most writers I know, it's not something they ever want to bring up. One thing, the comics you read as a kid, you read girly comics, or were you reading, so the boy superhero stuff when you were little? - Yeah, you know, some of the boy superhero, some Superman stuff, sure, sure. But I think more like Richie Rich and Archie's, and yeah, just stuff my mom read that was still being published when I was a kid, and yeah. - Cool, and my final question is, as someone who hasn't been able to finish writing a piece of fiction for around 20 years now, what sort of advice do you have in terms of just sitting down, spending the time you've mentioned on your blog, I know, working with writers, groups, and such, what do you find best for keeping it going? You mentioned starting in 2004, how did you keep the head of steam going? - It's a long process. So, wow, a lot of it is playing tricks with your mind when you're getting stuck, so I wrote a lot of my book in comic book font, because I just couldn't bear looking at Times New Roman anymore. I think of comics actually as this sort of astonishing superhero that came and saved my book at a point, because when I realized that that's what the narrator was into, and this was how she made sense of her world, and I started looking at them, I tried to really directly use some strategies from comics for pacing and action, and just getting a scene down from beginning to end, and also thinking in terms of frames, which made the whole project of a novel less intimidating, so I might say, you know, I'm just gonna work on this little frame, this little sequence, this little action sequence, or just this little bit of chapter five, and try to break it into very tiny parts, because when you sit down and you think of the whole massive project, it just takes your breath away, it's too much, yeah, so. - The comics save the day, that's a great center to have. - Astonishing. - Diana, well thank you for coming on a virtual memory show, and good luck with Tokyo Heist. - Thanks for having me. ♪ I've been working there to call up ♪ ♪ I consider it my day job ♪ ♪ 'Cause I stood it out ♪ - That was Diana Wren, and her new novel is Tokyo Heist. Go buy it, and check out her website, dianawren.net, that's R-E-N-N. And my next guest is Paul de Philippo, whom I introduced earlier. I thought initially about running these interviews as separate episodes, but when I listened to them for editing, I realized they actually formed pretty neat bookends. I mean, Diana has just published her first novel, and Paul's about to celebrate his 30-year anniversary as a freelance writer and critic. We talked about that history, and the traditions of a science fiction writing career, and his semi-formal title as King of Steampunk, and whether he would have taken an assignment on DC Comics Before Watchmen Project. ♪ I am ♪ ♪ Everybody says the old guy ♪ ♪ Working at the car one ♪ - My guest today, Paul de Philippo, author, critic, science fiction writer. I prefer to say extraordinaire, but everybody's got their definitions of that. We were talking earlier, you mentioned you've been freelance for 30 years, or you're about to hit your 30th anniversary. Any lessons to share? Or actually any warnings to give, I guess, is the appropriate way to put it? - Well, it's probably trite, but a lot of trite things are true nonetheless, and I was just reading somebody's comment on the same subject, and they cited a, they used a very intriguing adjective or a noun form of that adjective that you don't often hear too much, and it was resiliency, the ability to bounce back from either failures from outside, or things that you regard as internal failures in the light of your own hopes and aspirations. So I would say, having endured 30 years of this, that resiliency is a major quality. You have to kind of pick yourself up. Off the floor from whatever knocked you down, whether it was you disappointed yourself, or you met with frustration from editors, or you booked it and succeed as well as you thought it should, those kind of things will inevitably happen, and so you need to be able to cultivate a kind of sturdiness that will see you over them. - How possible is a career like yours now? What you've done, both in the novel writing, short fiction, reviews, et cetera, if you look at somebody young and coming up, do you even see this as a potential career path? Which I guess the big question is, how has the landscape changed since the time that you began, or actually if you want to go back and actually tell us about your history in writing? - Well, I think among the final generation of writers who could debut under the old paradigm, the old kind of commercial publishing paradigm that had been extant in science fiction, and genre publishing since the pulp era, and that paradigm, just to, or business model, just to refresh people's memory, was that there was a flourishing ecosystem of magazines, and science fiction remains today fairly remarkable in the fact that it does have a better ecosystem of magazines for short fiction than a lot of other genres. But at the time I began, I sold my first story back in 1977, although I didn't really shift into full gear until '82, which marks, that's the landmark that I'm using to count the 30 years. In that period, you could still, the field was small enough. It was five years after Star Wars, which was revolutionary in retrospectively speaking, we can say that Star Wars was revolutionary in how it changed the landscape of science fiction, but it was only five years after Star Wars, those major changes still haven't come down the fight. And so I kind of snuck in on the tail of the old model of making a name for yourself, and that was, you began in short fiction because you could write a novel, as we know, is a big challenging humongous task. And so you wanted to establish your skills and your chops and your reputation by doing short fiction. So you began turning out short stories to the best of your ability, and you began marketing them. And eventually you started showing up in magazine form, which is what happened to me. I sold my, well, I sold my first story in '77, but it was to a small press magazine. And then in '82, I started writing more seriously, and it took another couple of years till about late '84, when I sold two stories almost back to back, one to the magazine of fantasy and science fiction, and one to Twilight Zone magazine. And they came, they were published almost back to back also. So I was now embarked on that classic route, which so many authors had followed, Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, Clark. They all began this process. They started making their name as short fiction writers. And then after they had proven themselves and developed a track record, they graduated to book publication. And so that was kind of my route too. My first book didn't come out until I believe '92. So that's like a seven year period from '85 to '92, just selling one story after another, trying to hone my craft and get worthy of book publication. And then after that, it became, you were kind of in the system and you could snowball your credentials and build them up to a steady presence in the field. So that's the old paradigm. That's how I came up in the field. And you ask about people starting today, it's still kind of possible to do that, because as I said, there are a lot of short story slots in the science fiction field, mostly online these days. The online science fiction magazines outnumber the remaining print ones, I think by probably 10 to one. So there's, you can still hone your craft as a short fiction writer and start to accumulate some prestige and presence in the field. And we can even point to certain authors who have followed this path more recently than I. Ted Chiang, a very good writer, he hasn't done a novel yet, even though he's been prominent in the field for at least 10 years. He is following that short fiction route and having his work collected in book form eventually. So you can still do that, but nowadays it seems many authors, many would be authors and young authors and beginning authors tend to want to jump directly to book publication, which I think is almost a hotter route to follow. So I don't envy the new generation that much in terms of them, what they face trying to attain book publication prior to short story publication. - What do you think accounts for the, as you mentioned, that prevalence of magazines in the industry. Again, I've always known SF to be much more, I don't wanna say fan driven, but much more about the interaction of fan and author. Do you think there's anything structural within it? Do you have any thoughts on why there's that level of consumption, I guess, by readers? - Well, I think there's a couple of factors. I've probably never put this into words, but you're questioning instantly kind of evokes a couple of responses. First of all, there's sheer tradition. The fact that science fiction is a very, despite its reputation for being daring and adventurous and forward looking to a large extent, it is a field that relishes its traditions. And so magazines have always been a part of the field. And so I think there's some, it's not nostalgia because a lot of the webzines are founded by younger people who have no direct contact with that old print world. And yet they still see a short story magazine as being something desirable and emblematic of the field. So I think a lot of it, or maybe half of it stems from a certain kind of honoring of the past tradition of the field. But the other half, I think comes from the fact that short fiction is a form that lends itself to science fiction because you can get, if you have an idea, science fiction, as we know, builds itself as the field of ideas, and some ideas will support novel narratives. And other ideas are just a kind of, you know, wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. You want to get in and out fast. And so the short story is the perfect method to encapsulate those ideas. So having, if you believe that, that science fiction demands, or is it home in the short form, then you need some kind of, you need some kind of vehicle to transmit those short form science fiction pieces. So that vehicle is the magazine. Whereas, you know, with things like mystery novels, okay? A lot of mystery is atmosphere and characterization and elaborate plotting that leaves you, you know, guessing what the ultimate ending will be. And that kind of, that's almost more demands a long form narrative. Although, of course, there have been, you know, plenty of fine mystery short stories, and the mystery pulps were a huge part of the short fiction market for a long time. But on the other hand, I think a mystery writer might more naturally gravitate towards long form narratives than the short form ones. Whereas a science fiction writer often feels that, you know, they have this kind of knockout idea that can be encapsulated best in a short story. - And in your own experience, what's the process been like in terms of sort of getting to understand your audience or the multiple audiences for what you're writing? Which I guess is a way of asking how did you find your voice, you know, within the genre? - Well, you know, I always, I, every writer starts out as a reader. So, except, you know, for some very rare people who, I think, who's the guy who invented Fu Manchu and blanking on his name. - Writer Hackert? - No, no, not right, hi, Sax Romer. Sax Romer, I believe I've read that Sax Romer was almost not illiterate, but he just had no interest in fiction outside of his own creation. So, he'd be, he'd be kind of the rare instance of a writer who was not, who did not start as an ardent reader or fan. But, you know, 99.9% of writers all began as ardent readers and enthusiasts and fans of whatever particular type of fiction they enjoyed. So, I was in the same boat, and when I started writing, I often tried to emulate my role models or create the same kind of effects that I had enjoyed reading. And I think that's a very natural and spontaneous and kind of organic way that a lot of writers began, is that you are seeking to recreate the same pleasures that you had as a reader. So, having started with that, then you gradually say, well, okay, what can I add to this equation that's uniquely mine? That's where the refinement of one's style and voice begins to happen is that you say, okay, I'm not content with just writing something that evokes the same kind of sensations as when I was 14 years old and read, you know, Robert Heinlein, you start to say, okay, you know, that's a constricting vision and it's not totally creative. And so, you start adding your own refinements to that and blending and mashing things up. And that's the process I went through. And I think that seems to be what a lot of writers go through. - And you mentioned role models besides Heinlein, who did you have? - My mate, Deborah, and I shifted lodgings two years ago and of course there were 14,000 books to pack up. So, I got a chance to handle all these books that have been sitting industrial on the shelves for many years. And so, I started looking naturally, you see, okay, there's an enormous stack of this guy and enormous stack of this writer. And so, you can start to say, all right, well, these, you know, just by sheer volume, these are the people who influenced me in my younger days. And they were just, people were all over the map. I was a very eclectic reader, even as a teenager. I mean, on one day I'd be reading, you know, Andre Norton and the next day I'd be reading JJ Ballard. So, and I didn't see any dissonance between them 'cause I mean, I accepted, I knew that Norton wasn't Ballard and vice versa. They were doing different things and yet I could enjoy separately and depart the different things that they were doing. So, I mean, I've got huge stacks of Andre Norton books and Ballard and Philip K. Dick and Brian Aldis and Clifford Simak among the Golden Age writers. He was, I've read almost everything Simak has written and he was actually, he's kind of overlooked today but I found he had a very humanist, humane kind of perspective on things, not, well, Rockwellian in a way, like Norman Rockwell. He was a Midwesterner kind of guy and he was very salt of the earth and his science fiction, even if it was kind of had outrageous premises, it always involved people who were very easy to identify with. They were just average Joe, so to speak. They weren't, you know, Superman or mutant geniuses. They were just, and yet the adventures that they had would be very spectacular and over the top. So, Simak, I think he's, I don't know if I can point to any exact, you know, points in my career or stories that echo Simak, but he's in the back there as a very formative influence. - Well, I think about it. It does characterize a number of your short stories that I've read, the sort of normal guy in a situation that we find incredibly weird, but a person that we find, you know, like us, essentially. One of the segments I've had on the show before is Second Hand Loves, the books that you didn't like once upon a time or author you didn't like when you were younger, whom you've come around on. Does anyone qualify? - I don't know if I, like I say, my taste was so catholic that I could pick up almost anything and find, you know, even if they didn't become my new favorite writer, I would find something in them that I liked. And I don't know if I ever, you know, did the proverbial thing of throwing a book across the room and then going back to it later and picking it up. Let me think. - I think that with Cavalier and Clay, but I never picked up. - Yeah, I never picked never. - You know, I tried. - Traged twice, I didn't make it, so. - Well, you know, in terms of, I'm sure there are books I read as a kid that I didn't extract the full meaning of. And I would need to go back to those again and reread them. But one curse of the reviewer is that there's never time to reread anything. The press of reviewing books is, you know, we all know about the metaphor of the firehose of information that is the internet. And it's the same thing with books. When you're reviewing books for professionally, there's always something new coming down the pike and you don't often get a chance to go back and reread books. So that's a little regrettable, but I think, and I think I could benefit by going back and rereading some of that stuff that I didn't fully comprehend the first time around. - Given the sheer volume of books you're exposed to now, is there any sense of wonderment, similar to what you had then? I know life is much different than it was 30, 40, 50 years ago. - You know, everybody knows that that famous maxim, I think that the Golden Age of science fiction is 13. In other words, whatever SF or fantasy you encounter as an adolescent, you bond on and it's this transcendent, mind-blowing experience. And it's hard to replicate that. It should get older and I don't wanna use the word jaded, but a little more satiated, I think, with some of the tropes of science fiction. And so, you know, it's hard, it's hard as an adult, and especially as an adult regarding books with a critical eye for a reviewer's paycheck, it's hard sometimes to recreate that same sense of wonder, but it does happen. The books have to be almost extra superlative in a way to kind of evoke that same reaction that one might have gotten from the latest Conan, the barbarian tale of Robert E. Howard that you were encountering for the first time back then. But here's a couple of examples, okay? Neil Stevenson's new novel, Reendy or Remde, however you pronounce that strange misspelling. Not even science fiction, it's all available tech, it has a contemporary setting, but that just knocked me out. That was a superior book. I mean, it just, it's a thriller, it's very propulsive, you know, you race through it, and yet it's totally, it's constructed very artfully, the characters are great, the suspense is there, so something like that. When you're reading the work of a master, like Stevenson, I mean, there's no way you're not going to have that, that same kind of thrill, you know, the analogous to the thrill you had, one had as a teenager. But then even another book that I really enjoyed the heck out of was by Ernest Klein, it's his debut novel Ready Player One, which got, I was turned onto it by a reference on the blog, Boing Boing, where Mark Fraunfelder was raving about this book. And so I said, okay, debut novel, and it's about video games. It's a hard-core science fiction novel, and the central trope is video games in the future. And I'm not a gamer, and I said, okay, let me see, you know, what's so great about this book, and it'll be a real test because I'm not naturally predisposed to the subject matter, and it was, it's a knockout book. I voted for it. I'm on the jury for the John W. Campbell Best Novel Award, and so we looked at about 100 novels this year, and that was, I made sure to tout that to my fellow judges, and it's on the shortlist. I can't, the final winner will be revealed in a few weeks at their annual ceremony, but I made sure, I was so in love with this book that I touted it to my fellow judges, and it ended up being on the shortlist for the Campbell Award. So, discovering a new writer like that, that is kind of analogous to that same sense of discovery that you get when you're an adolescent, because like, okay, if I pick up the new Greg Baer book, you know, I've been reading him for the entire length of his career, whatever, which is longer than my career, I think he started publishing a little bit before me, so I've been reading him for so long, I know it's gonna be a great book, but I mean, the sense of discovery is not the same as finding a brand new writer that you've never encountered before. So, you have to, I think as an adult, you know, we'll use the word jaded, even though it has bad connotations, but as a kind of satiated or jaded reader, I think you can still recover those same adolescent thrills, but you have to work harder at it, that's for sure, and you have to find a really superlative writer, you know, just picking up the average SF novel is not gonna do it for you. - Sure, you occasionally have the stack that shows up with just a, yeah, okay, you know, to try to find something worth writing about. And in that respect, how's the market changed, especially since the time that you've been doing reviews? - Well, we all, I think we all know that surprisingly, what happened is that fantasy, which was always pre-tulking, was always science fiction's little sister, little kind of drab urchin sister, has now dominated the market, that fantasy outsell science fiction by phenomenal rates. And so, the fact that commercially science fiction has taken a back seat to fantasy is kind of disturbing, because although I like both, I think I'm more naturally a science fiction geek and all of that. - Same. - And yeah, and to have it, and a lot of people have worried that, you know, it's on a path to extinction, for one reason, the hardcore kind of predictive science fiction, not necessarily the space opera type stuff, but... - Do you think it's a function of the fact that we essentially live in the future now? - That's a large part of it, is that a lot of the allure of that science fiction offered is right in the palm of our hands nowadays, and so some of that is responsible for it. A lot of people have posited that by focusing on dystopias, science fiction has done itself a disservice, because dystopias have a kind of grim allure to them, they're fun to read about, because when you close the book, you look around and say, well, I guess life isn't as bad as the Hunger Games, or 1984, or McCarthy's The Road, you know? So they have a kind of chilly attraction about them, but on the other hand, they don't have that same kind of, I call it an aspirational future that science fiction used to present, where you'd read Robert Heinlein's have spacesuit will travel one of his young adult books, and you'd instantly want to live in that future where your average teenage boy could buy a spacesuit and rehabilitate and then be off on a galactic adventure in the next moment. So a lot of people have said that science fiction has abandoned that very strong suit that it once was so good at, and in fact, to get back to Neil Stevenson, that's his big kick now, is that he published an essay, which I think is still available online, called Innovation Starvation a few months ago, and maybe a year ago now, and he takes science fiction to task, saying that we let down our readers by not providing these big visions, which are not meant to be kind of Pollyanna sugar-coated visions, because there are always problems and obstacles in the best science fiction novel, but type of novel, but they're always somehow met, even if at great cost by the protagonists and the societies in these books. So he's vowed that whenever he writes science fiction from now on, it's going to be this kind of realistic and yet aspirational kind of science fiction, and he's even founding a magazine to kind of encourage this, he's putting his personal money where his beliefs are. So that could be one reason why the science fiction readership is dwindling. Another might be just the fact that fantasy is more escapist in a certain way. - You're counting sexy vampires as fantasy also. - Right, yeah, exactly, the paranormal romance and urban fantasy stuff it is. It's more wish fulfillment a lot of times, and it's more because it veers away from consensus reality, more steeply than science fiction does. It's an escape. It's a way to forget about mortgage payments and unemployment and things. I mean, you can be, you know, fighting orcs is horrible, but it's not quite as bad as paying the mortgage, finding the money for the mortgage payment, so it's much more what people want to do with their leisure time. - I think especially in terms of your first point, the way both Stevenson and William Gibson seem largely to have eschewed science fiction and move towards essentially a contemporary thriller. I know Stevenson had a science fiction novel a few years ago, I haven't read it yet, Anitham, I think. But for the most part, it's been either this contemporary work or his Baroque cycle, Gibson also like an asymptote, got closer and closer to the present with his fiction. That is an interesting point in terms of what it is that-- - Well, science fiction, as you were saying, science fiction converging with the present, whereas they start to resemble each other more and more, and so Gibson feels that, you know, by writing about these somewhat who trade contemporary scenarios that he is writing science fiction of a sort, just because modern reality approaches science fiction as opposed to-- - Again, you can't create something that's going to be weirder than the world we live in, I think is his motif nowadays. Do you think Ridley Scott's visions between "Alien" and "Blade Runner" actually have more of an impact on how we actually frame science fiction and the future than "Star Wars" did? - Yes, well, when I said "Star Wars" was influential on the field, I didn't mean so much on the authors because I think most-- - More space opera, sir. - Right, most authors recognized and acknowledged that "Star Wars" at least the first trilogy is as exciting and thrilling and fun as it was, were recycled visions or older visions that they weren't cutting edge, they weren't breaking new territory. And so science fiction in print was not directly modified by "Star Wars," but the marketplace was because all of a sudden, "Star Wars" illustrated that you could, for the first time, recreate on the screen the same kind of thrills that print science fiction had engendered in people's interior brain theaters. You could bring that to the screen. And so that's another reason, I think, why print science fiction is lagging is because a lot of what it provided is now there on the screen. You can, you know, the CGI is so phenomenal that you can get the same kicks on the screen that it used to take print to deliver in more, I won't say more attenuated forms, but in a different interior kind of form. So that's what I meant when I said "Star Wars" had a huge impact on science fiction because it stole some of our thunder and our bag of tricks. And, but when you mentioned "Alien and Blade Runner," yes, obviously those fed back into the print science fiction because they were more sophisticated visions. And so, so print science fiction did indeed, I think learn from those and adapt some of the stylistic elements and the same, the kind of storytelling narrative elements back into print science fiction. - What's it like being the King of Steampunk? - Oh, well that, you know, that's kind of, this has been a Steampunk week on Monday of this week. I got interviewed for an forthcoming Steampunk documentary and then just yesterday, Saturday, I was at a museum in nearby Connecticut that's having a whole Steampunk month of exhibitions and speeches and so forth. So this is, that's a good question during this week in particular. And I don't know if I am, I mean, I was in on the ground floor and I've written a little bit of occasional Steampunk pieces here and there, but I'm certainly not parlaying it into everything that I could. I think to my, either for Good or Real in my career. - Well, I agree with it though. How did you, you know, where did you begin with that? - Well, you know, it was, it was very nice to have a book that's remained in people's consciousness for like some 20 years now. So that was, because that's what every author, I think wants is to have a lot of longevity and to feel that their books are not just disposable. So it was, having that volume come out when it did kind of at the beginning of the burgeoning Steampunk movement was very nice. And I haven't gone back and reread those stories. They were among some of my earliest, you know, so I like to think they hold up craft-wise but it's kind of scary to go back and contemplate them and see how I would have done things differently. But I'm still working in the Steampunk mode. The latest story I wrote, which is, I wrote it specifically for a convention in Italy which requested it. They said, we're lacking in Steampunk with an Italian setting. Why don't you give us some Italian Steampunk? And being my heritage and all, I instantly agreed. I said, okay, so I wrote a longish story for them called "A Palazzo in the Stars" and it set in Venice in the late 1800s. And so that felt good to kind of, I felt I was broadening the remit of Steampunk a little bit by, because of course, so much of Steampunk is Victorian US or Victorian England that, you know, if we can, a lot of people are intent on expanding its global focus. So to set this story in Italy felt a little forward looking so I was happy to do that. So I still continue to work in the Steampunk vein and I think there's a lot of potential there. I actually want to go backwards to, I don't know, people have debated what you would call Steampunk-style stories before the era of Steem. I don't know if you'd call it Horsepower Punk or Clock Punk was proposed for a while when things worked by clockwork mechanism. So I don't know if this concept I have is Clock Punk or Horsepower Punk or whatever, but it would be set, it's a novel to be set in the 1600s and the protagonist would be the great philosopher, Bishop Barkley, the fellow who had very weird ideas about how the universe, they were almost Heisenbergian ideas about how the universe was determined by our perceptions of it. And so I was always interested in him ever since I discovered him in a college philosophy course and I thought that his ideas were very amenable to science fictional treatment. And then, much to my surprise, I discovered that he was a resident of my native state, Rhode Island. In the 1600s, he lived in Newport, Rhode Island, the city that is well known for its Victorian period mansions that were inhabited by all the industrialists and robber barons of the time. But in the 1600s, Newport was the capital of the state, not Providence, and Bishop Barkley took up residence for a few years, he eventually went back to England. And his house is still standing and it's a museum. And so that local connection kind of solidified my affinity for him and I figured the research would be easier too if I never had to leave the state. I could set his adventures here, Rhode Island, during the period where he was here. - Now let me ask, what does Providence mean to you? You've been here all your life, right? - Well, I grew up not in the city, but north of the city, but of course, even from in elementary school, I would ride the bus from the suburbs into the city and there was a great bookstore, which it's official name, its name was paperback bookstore. That was the name it had. Yeah, it was like, you know, generic store. - Tellin' you what's there. - Yeah, paperback bookstore, and that's what they sold, mass market paperback, so we're really no trade paperbacks per se at the time. But I mean, I'd go in and there'd be the science fiction rack and I'd grab, you know, three or four Andre Norton's for 35 cents or 50 cents each. It was very discouraging when they went up to 50 cents each of the paperbacks. And so I've had a connection with the city, you know, ever since I was about probably 10 years old. And it's just, it's a very agreeable place to live in. It's moderate sized, even though we're only 175,000 people, we're still the second biggest city in New England, which speaks to-- - More about New England than the promise. - Yeah, it tells you more about New England than necessarily the city. But it has a beautiful stock of historical architecture, which is very, you know, it's just pleasant to your aesthetic sense to be walking around the city and be surrounded by older, gorgeous buildings and not, you know, some kind of brutalist architecture, like Boston City, all this famous for. So it's a very agreeable city. Physically, it's more moderately priced than Boston to the north or New York to the south, and yet those cities are very accessible from Providence. So it just features a lot of appealing things about it. And of course, I've come to be kind of a, I don't know if I deem myself an expert, but a person who has a layman's knowledge of the history of the city. And so things are very resonant, you know, I see, I walk past a certain apartment building in the back of my mind. Oh yeah, there was a fort here in colonial times. And so that kind of residence that you get, I think from living in one place for a long time is something that you can't instantly acquire and is, if you're rooted in one spot, it has a lot of positivity, I think. - There's any notion of writing the Ulysses of Providence. - The Ulysses of Providence, that would be a great thing to accomplish. - 'Cause I was thinking, keeping up with the Lovecraftians could be just a great title if you want to steal that, that's perfectly fine. - That would be a great thing to accomplish because I mean, the city is, it does have a lot of resonance in it. You know, like all the cities in the original 13 colonies, a lot has happened here. Providence is now 375 years old. So, you know, it's not a patch on the European cities, but it's pretty old in terms of American landscapes. So, and then of course it has a lot, it has several great universities here and those who offer the benefits of a college town. So, yeah, there's a lot to keep us here and keep us happy. - You've written for comics before and you've actually written to extend an Alan Moore created property in top 10. Have you thought about whether you would have taken on before Watchmen had DC called up and said, you know, we need you to write the, you know, the Ozymandias or the, the Rojak comic. - Well, you know, that, that was, I think every writer who was interested in comics and had any remote possibility of being tapped to do that, I think every writer instantly asked themselves this immense ethical question because here's this series, which I, you know, I love the original Alan Moore Watchmen and now here's the corporate parent doing something against the creator's explicit desires, you know, extending the series with these before Watchmen episodes. And so, on the one hand, there is, there's the impulse to say, okay, I'm being offered this toy box that somebody else has created and they're such great toys. You know, I do, it would be wonderful to pick up these toys and play with them and test my talents against the master who created them in the first place. So there is that, there is, I think, a legitimate desire upon the part of creative people to say, you know, it's the same thing as writing Batman. You say, okay, here's Batman, I didn't create Batman. Millions of people have handled him before me and millions of people will handle Batman after me and yet here's my chance to tap into this archetypical mythic figure and do something with it. So there is that genuine, I think, and laudable creative impulse to try to add your little brick to the vast edifice that is Batman or Watchmen or whatever. So having said that, that, you know, would have motivated me to say yes, yes, let me do these before on Watchmen books. But on the other hand, I think I would have then said, you know, let me put myself in Alan Moore's place. Here's, you know, in my case, I created this, this kind of subgenre of biological science fiction that I call rival funk. Now suppose that somehow I had lost the corporate rights to rival funk and all of a sudden somebody is on the landscape saying, oh, yeah, I'm gonna write new stories in D. Philippo's universe and he has no say about it. And in fact, he'll never see any profits from it. And in fact, we're going to say corporate things, you know, the kind of ridicule him and stuff. So how, you know, if I would have put myself in that position, I think that probably would have been the determining factor that would have said, okay, as much as I wanna handle these bright, alluring, attractive tropes that Alan Moore created and characters, I think I probably would have stepped back and said, no, I'm just gonna have to say no, even though I could use the paycheck. - Understood. Again, 30 years in freelance. - Right, right. - It puts you on a certain wavelength, a certain creator's empathetic wavelength with other creators. - Paul de Philippo, I wanna thank you for your time and the virtual memory show. - Oh, it's been wonderful, Gil. Thanks, the wonderful set of questions. (upbeat music) ♪ But I say help me, help me, help me, help me ♪ - And that was Paul de Philippo. You can find his books on Amazon and Barnes & Noble as well as independent bookstores. And you can also find his reviews at locus online and Barnes & Noble's BN review site. I recommend diving into his short stories, pretty much any darn volume. And that's another episode of the virtual memory show. Thanks for listening. I've got a trip to Montreal schedule later this month, so we'll see if I come back with any neat interviews. I'm Gil Roth, and you are awesome. (upbeat music) ♪ Come back ♪ ♪ What I said, help me, help me, help me, help me ♪ ♪ Paul de Philippo, thank you for watching ♪ ♪ Listening to my prayer ♪ (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]