John Joseph Adams - Editor & Anthologist

To do so will bring you much prosperity and joy.  (Well, that seems a better answer than the very uninteresting “I have interesting things to say, and say them in an interesting way.”)

I rescued you from the slush pile.  Yet when I cried out for blurbs for my blog, you didn’t give me one.  Tell me why, you ungrateful wretch!  Or make it up to me by giving me one now.

It’s a little bit country, a little bit rock ’n roll….

Or…

John offers an insider’s view of the world of fiction publishing, a view rarely seen by mere mortals.  Better still, he presents it with glee and humor.  What’s not to like?

You made a pro sale.  That’s not quite a big enough score to quit your day job.  So what’s your day job?

Knowledge transfer/management consultant. 

What’s that in English, you ask?  I provide a range of technology consulting services for clients–technical documentation, training development, project management….  What ties all these things together is that I assist clients in transferring the knowledge from one group (usually developers) to another group of people (users, auditors, Help Desk staff, etc.). 

How long had you been writing before you made this sale?

If you assume I started when I was 6, more than 30 years.  If you start the count from when I started to get a lot more serious, about 7.

Did you workshop this story, or get feedback from friends or relatives?  What was the reaction to it–were all your peers and family sure you’d sell this one pro?

This was my desperation story for Clarion, week 6.  That means that, by the time I wrote this piece, I was utterly fried and unable to come up with anything for the last week of the workshop.  Someone suggested retelling fairy tales as an exercise, so– that’s what I did.  Some people in the group liked the story, some were lukewarm.  But I did get feedback that, some time down the road, allowed me to make the thing work.   

Have you ever written, or been tempted to write a rejected-writer-gets-revenge-on-editors story?

Hmm.  Never have, no.  Maybe it’s because Karen Joy Fowler once told me I’m not allowed to really whine about the number of rejections I’ve received until I hit three digits.  I’m not a fast enough writer (when holding down a day job) to have generated that many, even now.  So–well, I do whine, but I try not to let Karen hear about it….

I did spoof the sort of artsy-fartsy pseudo-literary stuff that college literary mags wanted when I wrote a novella at age 20.  A friend told me it was a spot-on spoof.  Alas, the rest of the tale didn’t quite hold together.

Do you remember the first story you ever wrote?  What was it about?  How bad was it?  Did you ever submit it anywhere?

I was six, I think.  It went something like this: “Jimmy had a cat.  You make up the rest of the story.”  So, no, I never submitted it.  And we can also deduce that, even early on, plot was a bit of a challenge for me.

I did place a story in the children’s magazine Stone Soup when I was 11.  Curiously enough, that was a fairy tale, too–an invented one, in this case.

What was the first magazine you ever submitted a story to?

Besides Stone Soup (see above)–Westwind, the arts magazine at UCLA.  They were looking more for “literary” fiction [which I still think translated to unreadable], so–my submissions went nowhere.

What’s the silliest mistake you’ve ever made when submitting a manuscript?

Believing I needed to publish in “literary” magazines. 

Talk about the primary fantasy element in your story. 

“The Millstone” is a retelling of a fairy tale, in which a princess transforms herself into a cat in order to evaluate a perspective suitor. 

What kind of research did you do for your story?

I looked at a bunch of fairy tale anthologies, flipped one open, and found the original.

What have you been working on since your big sale?  More short fiction?  Novels?  Little of both?

Both, and I confess I haven’t been spending enough time on either.  I have some short fiction that’s nearly ready to go out, some that may yet work if I can solve a few big problems–and a novel that’s been vexing me in various forms for several years.  (I’ll figure it out, one of these days.)

Why do you write SF instead of some other genre?

I decided that if I’m going to spend time writing, I wanted to enjoy the world I’m writing about (and I mean “world” in a non-planetary sense–all writers inhabit a world when they write).  Writing isn’t necessarily always fun for me; but writing about imagined worlds, where I have the freedom to explore both inner and outer landscapes as I wish, does increase the “fun” quotient.  You can also say things in fantasy and sf that may be harder for people to take if placed in mainstream or realistic fiction. 

What’s the first SF novel you ever read?  How old were you?

The first adult SF novel I read was Dolphin Island by Arthur C. Clarke, when I was about 8. 

I did read others before that — Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series, and just about anything by Lloyd Alexander.  Determining the very first–whew, don’t know that I could!

Who are some of your favorite writers?  Which writers influenced you?

My largest influences were Tolkien (because he introduced the possibilities of fantasy to me) and Virginia Woolf (because her style becomes hypnotic after awhile; and ellipses become seductive…).  There are a lot of other writers I hope (wish?) have been influential, including Terry Bisson, Karen Joy Fowler, Guy Gavriel Kaye, Tad Williams, Robin Hobb, J.K. Rowling–to name a few. 

What are the limitations of SF? 

The biggest limitation is in the eye of the beholder.  What’s being done in our field is some of the most ground-breaking fiction writing currently available.  But as long as we’re seen as just genre fiction, the work will not get the full attention it deserves.

What’s wrong with media SF?  Why do they always screw everything up, even the stuff that’s based on quality source material?

I can think of a number of problems.  One is that some concepts might be tough to explicate in film (such as how you’re actually making FTL travel possible).  Another is that media is controlled by corporations, and they aren’t known for their artistry or vision.  Related to this: Filmmakers often assume the audience has less intelligence than they do.

I would argue, though, that media doesn’t always screw things up.  I went to see Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series with real fear, and came away astonished. 

What’s the most played out trope in science fiction?

That’s tough.  I guess FTL travel and its attendant tropes (e.g., instantaneous communication across galaxies).  I may be missing something obvious, of course. 

You’re an exciting newcomer to the field.  What other newcomers to the field are you excited about? 

This is a challenging question, because I don’t want to get into trouble with anyone I’ve left off my list.  Some of my Clarion colleagues from the Clarion class of ‘97 are pretty terrific writers, and I think you’ll see some great stuff from among these new writers: Jae Brim, K.Z. Perry, G. Scott Huggins, M.L. Konett.  There are others, too, though I’m not sure how prolific they’re being just now.

When someone interviews you again in ten years, what are they going to be asking you about?

The world of my novel–because dammit, I’ll have it figured out by then!

If this year’s Hugo nominees for Best Professional Editor (Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois, David Hartwell, Stanley Schmidt, and Gordon Van Gelder) were all daikaiju and they all met up for a rumble in New York City to battle over the right to publish your new story, which one would come out victorious, and how would it all go down? 

I suspect it would be GvG–because he seems to like my sense of humor and writing.  And certainly loyalty is worth something–he’s the first pro editor on that list to publish something of mine.  Besides, my writing is a lot more F&SF than Analog.  I wouldn’t mind writing hard SF, but it’s hard to imagine I’ll ever pull it off….