Tonight I was thinking of an experience of mine in my early twenties. As I was thinking about it, I suddenly had an intense need to fictionalise it and I could have gone two ways. It could have been a literary fiction piece but then again, I’ve never been able to write a literary fiction piece without inserting something SFnal, or Gothic, or fantasy-related. And so I began another tale of Lusini because are you kidding me, if I’m going to be yet writing another [REDACTED] short story it’s got to be set in Lusini, right? So, I’m happy with what I’ve got right now, and I’m excited to finish it. But I do have a grand space opera caper of a novelette to finish first…nearly there!
Every piece of science fiction I write has its grounding in literary fiction and in that other thing: experience spooled out in a fantastic way. It could be a song. It could be an emotion that I wanted to express but I needed to tell it slant. The feeling of loss and of the awareness of my own mortality became Your Right Arm because obviously one confronts one’s mortality by writing about the last human who ever lived. Prosthetic Daughter became a way for me to reclaim my selfhood and my autonomy when I was being emotionally terrorised by things I choose not to talk about these days. Dreams Strung Like Pearls Between War and Peace happened during a time when I was inflicted with latent tuberculosis and had tachycardia/arrhythmia episodes because of the treatment I was on (and when I was painfully aware I was spending waaay too much money to overcompensate for the health horror show). There were other aspects of life at that time that slipped into that short story but mostly it was because I wanted to revisit some beloved characters who appear in my as-yet-unfinished Yrole Triptych novels. There have also been some published short stories that while not dealing directly with it, were fuelled by the emotional intensity of my bereavement for my father.
So that’s how I like my science fiction. I like neat concepts and SFnal vistas, but I prefer it all grounded by human experience in all of our fallibilities and foibles. I like to inject one element from my life (or maybe two, or three) and then let the alchemy of storytelling and sensawunda take it to places I would never go, create people I would never be. I think that’s why I remain forever hooked by Ursula K LeGuin’s work. It rings true to me and resonates on so many levels. I feel the same way about Martha Wells’s Murderbot books which I love so passionately. And the best short SF fiction I’ve read have all contained that kernel of humanity and of human fallibility.
That said, I really am trying to write more literary fiction which is why I’ve been tearing through literary fiction books these days, trying to find that impulse within me. If I ever write more of those, I’ll probably still be telling it slant, though. There will likely still be either Gothic or SFnal elements because that’s the way I roll. But the adventure of it, the discovery of it will fuel me.
Till the next blog post,
xx
Anita
ps: Work is proceeding at a fairly regular pace on Rosemirror (messed up left hand inflicted with RSI-notwithstanding), apart from my little flings with short fiction and with that Laneverse stand-alone novel which I’m going to be using for my next round of agent queries next year. I actually flung myself into that Laneverse novel last weekend and am suddenly love-drunk on it again. I hope you will be too.