Nick Sagan is the son of astronomer Carl Sagan and artist/writer Linda Salzman.  He was born in Boston, MA in 1970, and grew up in Ithaca, NY and Los Angeles, CA. Prior to becoming a novelist, he worked for several years in Hollywood, writing scripts for a variety of projects, including several episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager.  His novels include Idlewild (2003), Edenborn (2004), and Everfree (2006).  You can visit his website at www.nicksagan.com.

Science Fiction Weekly interviewed Sagan via e-mail in April 2006.

At age six, a recording of you saying “Hello from the children of planet Earth,” was placed aboard NASA’s Voyager spacecraft, which has in the years since left our solar system.  How does it feel to be among the voices on Voyager’s “Golden Record”?

It’s a wonderful thrill, and I’m honored to have played a small part in such an ambitious and noble endeavor.  My parents sat me down in front of a microphone and asked me to say something for potential extraterrestrials to hear.  I’m sure I didn’t understand the full significance at the time, but I remember feeling a palpable excitement about the optimism of the Golden Record, reaching out into the unknown, searching for intelligent life and proof we’re not alone.  Looking back, it all seems so surreal.

There’s pride and gratitude, but also a wistful quality to how I feel.  That recording of my voice is on the most distant human-made object in the universe.  Every day it flies farther and farther away from home.  It’s as if my childhood is somehow on Voyager, my innocence.  I was six years old when we recorded it.  My parents separated when I turned seven.

And I suppose there’s an existential feeling as well.  Everyone wants some kind of immortality.  Through pure accident of my birth, my voice will live on long after I’m dead.  The world could blow up tomorrow—Voyager will continue on.

That’s wildly strange and cool.  Still, if I’m going to be remembered for any single thing after I’m dead, I’d much rather it be for the stories I tell as an adult, and not what I said as a child.

What was it like growing up with such a world-renowned icon as a father?

When a kid has a question about the universe, many fathers shrug, or tell him to look it up and stop being a nuisance.  That was never my dad.  The man had a fantastic breadth and depth of knowledge, and a love of teaching.  He was the best teacher I could have asked for.  If you’ve seen Cosmos, you have a pretty good sense of him.  Just add loving, caring, proud-of-my-son-and-want-him-to-do-well to the mix—that was my dad while I was growing up.

But the “world-renowned” part—well, from my point of view, that wasn’t always such a great thing.  We couldn’t go out in public without fans coming up to shake his hand, ask for autographs, etc.  That got in the way, and between my parents’ divorce and how busy his workload was, I already wasn’t spending as much time with him as I would have liked.  You wind up sharing your family time with the world—with celebrity, that’s the nature of the beast.  You also struggle with questions of identity.  You’re not just you.  You’re so-and-so’s son.  You have to live up to that.  Everyone you meet will presume things about you that may not be true.  If you want to be appreciated for who you are, you have to continually prove yourself.  That can get wearing after a while.  And I remember being very suspicious of the people who wanted to befriend me.  “Is this because of me, or does it have something to do with the last name?”

Still, as crosses to bear go, these are minor ones—many of my friends had more difficult paths to adulthood.  What’s more, the negatives are offset by the pride I feel for being his son.  Carl Sagan inspired millions to learn about science and skepticism, and opened their minds to the wonders of the universe.  Many scientists today became scientists purely because of him.  The impact of what he did continues to this day.  And I was lucky enough to know the private man behind the public figure.  Not a day goes by that I don’t wish he were still here.

The way Idlewild deals with virtual reality invites comparisons to The Matrix.  But where The Matrix’s use of virtual reality doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense (they’re being used as batteries?), the virtual reality depicted in Idlewild actually seems plausible.

In an essay on the writing of his novel Starplex, Robert J. Sawyer said it was his attempt at “Star Trek done right.” Was Idlewild your attempt at “The Matrix done right”?

Guilty.  But before anyone takes that the wrong way, let me qualify it.

First, by no means was this the genesis of Idlewild.  It wasn’t like I saw The Matrix, said, “I can do better than that,” and wrote Idlewild as a reaction.  In fact, the original germ for my story came to me before I’d ever seen The Matrix.  But once I did see it, I knew I had to differentiate the virtual reality in my book, and take care not to fall into the same patterns.

Second, I enjoyed the heck out of The Matrix (the first movie, at least).  Wire fu, gunplay, black threads and some thought-provoking ideas—I’m a fan of all these things.  The Wachowskis are talented filmmakers, and calling Idlewild a stab at “The Matrix done right” might suggest that I have disdain for them, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

That said, you’re absolutely right that The Matrix doesn’t make much sense.  Human beings are the best fuel source the machines can find?  Absurd.  Punching a computer program in a simulated world actually hurts that program in a meaningful way?  Even more absurd.  And if we “die” in the simulation, the psychic shock of that fictional death will somehow kill us in the real world?  That’s Freddy Krueger territory.  Entertaining, but I don’t believe it.  And if I don’t believe what I’m seeing, it only has power to reach me so far.  There’s a certain point past which it just can’t penetrate.

Stephen Baxter called Idlewild, “the essential read for The Matrix generation,” and Neil Gaiman likened it to “Amber meets The Matrix.”  Both are huge compliments in my book.  But I don’t claim to have done The Matrix right—I’ve just written about virtual reality in a way that meshes with my sensibilities.  I’m very happy that it seems to resonate strongly with other people as well.

You killed off most of the human race with a virus called “Black Ep.”  Explain for us how that virus works and whether or not such a thing is frighteningly plausible.

Deadly pandemics are, unfortunately, all too plausible.  The influenza of 1918-1919 claimed 70 million lives, making it an even larger cause of death than World War I.  With viruses mutating so quickly (and sometimes into more virulent forms), it’s not hard to imagine a 21st century plague that wipes out many millions more.

But billions?  How does a pandemic become a “world-killer?”  You’d think that quarantines and modern medicine would keep the lucky, paranoid and health-obsessed among us from falling prey.  Were HIV to mutate into an airborne strain, many would die, but some would isolate themselves, fleeing into self-contained, airtight environments if need be.  Surely, there’s no way to wipe out everyone, right?  As tragic as these sorts of catastrophe would be, isn’t the human race bound to survive?  Not necessarily.

Imagine a slow-acting microorganism that can incubate harmlessly in a body for years.  (Mad cow disease, for example, can remain hidden for decades—then it bores holes in the brain.)  Because we don’t realize we have it, we unknowingly spread it.  Years later, when it turns virulent, we discover that we have a pandemic on our hands.  We spring into action, but by then everyone’s already contracted it.  Or consider your DNA.  We may have mapped the human genome, but 98.5% of it is so-called “junk DNA” that serves no apparent purpose.  It’s just a mess of random-seeming data, evolutionary artifacts that have been encoded for who-knows-how-many generations.  While this part of the code isn’t hurting us now, a deadly pathogen could be buried within all that data, dormant but waiting for something to trigger it.  Another microorganism or even an environmental factor.  We’ve been tampering with the environment for years without truly understanding the consequences of what we’ve been doing.

I’ll happily admit that Black Ep and other SF-based world-killer plagues are less likely to pop up here in the real world—the next pandemic we encounter has a better chance of killing a fraction of us instead of all of us.  Hopefully, just a small fraction.  Even so, the potential for total extinction of the human race exists—an alarming possibility.

In Everfree, the character Sloane describes the people who spend all their time in the IVR (Immersive Virtual Reality) as “idiots…[who are] too scared to face the world.”  Are those people really so different than those of us who immerse ourselves in entertainment–spending much of our time watching TV or movies, playing video games, or reading novels?

No, they’re not so different at all.  I’d say we’re on the way to becoming IVR addicts—all that separates us is the level of technology.

Too much of anything is a bad thing, and while escapes into fantasy can be gratifying, they can also be self-destructive, a siren call.  You can see this with players of massively multiplayer online games.  Most players can enjoy them responsibly, but some alienate their spouses, neglect their families, lose their jobs and homes, and sometimes their health and even their lives because they prefer a simulation of reality to the one they’ve got.  Here’s a blog dedicated to tracking the phenomenon.  Now maybe your ideal alternate reality doesn’t involve killing orcs, amassing gold and leveling up.  It doesn’t have to—something appeals to your sense of wonder, and whether it’s your favorite film, book, chat room or what-have-you, if you were to discover that someone had fashioned a virtual simulation of it, you’d stand a fair chance of getting hooked.  What if that simulation could be perceived with all five senses?  What if the technology made it feel as “real” as what you’re experiencing right now?  And what it served as a refuge from all your real world problems?  Hello, electronic opiate.

You may be familiar with the 1950s tests where experimenters used electrodes to send small shocks to the pleasure centers of lab animals’ brains.  The subjects had a choice of pushing one of two levers: one released a food pellet, and one triggered a pleasurable shock.  Very few food pellets were ever released—the euphoric feeling was what they craved, again and again and again, even when starving.  Given the right stimuli, that could be us.

This is what Sloane’s reacting against, and because she’s a self-centered, belligerent character, she presents the criticism in self-centered, belligerent terms.  I’m more sympathetic because I’ve fallen into this trap before.  Heck, I wouldn’t be a fiction writer if I hadn’t retreated into fantasy many times.  It’s only dangerous when you can’t find your way back out.

Incidentally, many years ago, I remember showing my dad a computer game for the Apple II.  Baseball simulator.  Primitive by today’s standards, but you could match some of the greatest teams of all time against each other—say, Babe Ruth’s 1927 Yankees against Jackie Robinson’s 1955 Dodgers.  He played an inning, told me how much he liked it, and asked me to never show it to him again.  “I can see myself spending far too much time with this,” he said.

The book seems to say that humans are genetically predisposed toward violence.  Is our only chance at world peace to do something as drastic as in the novel, or is it achievable by some other means?

Without a drastic change to human nature, I think it’s reasonable to doubt that world peace will ever be anything more than a pipedream.  Thousands of years of recorded human history, and look at where we are today.  Look at what we are.  Genetically, we’re not so far from chimpanzees.  Are chimps capable of cooperation, compassion, tolerance and compromise?  Yes, but they’re far more likely to form tyrannical hierarchies, and then persecute, rape and kill chimps from other groups.  That’s deeply ingrained primate behavior.  It goes back millions of years.  A few thousand years of human culture and philosophy has a hard time standing up to “might makes right.”  In the animal kingdom, might typically prevails, and our genes know this.  They tell us to fight or flee, lead or obey, exploit or be exploited.  We can talk about egalitarian utopias all we like, but the aggression lurks within us just the same.

Evolution has a way of recalibrating, so I can imagine a scenario where, without any manmade interference, our genes eventually “catch up” to our loftiest ideals.  But how many millions of years will that take?  And how long do we have?  Technology ups the stakes.  A hundred years ago, if you wanted to kill a certain person or tribe, you had no chance of wiping out the entire human race.  Now we have enough nuclear arms to annihilate our population many times over.  Proliferation is out of control, weapons are unaccounted for, and many nuclear have-nots are actively pursuing the technology to make their own bombs.  We are developing newer, deadlier technologies all the time.  Mapping the human genome is sure to lead to amazing medical breakthroughs, but consider the flipside: the potential to make horrifying biological agents is greater than ever before.  How many weapons have we humans created that we haven’t later tested and used?

I don’t want to paint too bleak a picture.  We’re an incredibly resourceful species, capable of solving all manner of problems.  It can be done.  But can it be done without drastic steps?  Or without terrible consequence?  I don’t have confidence in that.  There are reasons to be hopeful, but I see more reasons for concern.

Halloween, one of the primary characters in your trilogy,  professes a love for both Edgar Alan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.  Who are your literary favorites and/or inspirations?

Not surprisingly, you’ll find Poe and Lovecraft on my list of favorites as well.  Fear is a good thing, and they got my blood pumping, especially during my teen years when I read them obsessively.  Michael Moorcock, too.  I remember reading a lot of horror and dark fantasy during that time.

Looking earlier in my life, Susan Cooper’s masterful The Dark Is Rising sequence served as a major inspiration.  For me, that series was the first to raise the possibility that everyday reality might be more than it seems.  I’d read stories about good battling evil in faraway fantasylands like Narnia, Oz, Middle Earth or Barsoom, but here the struggle was on Earth, and the stakes were nothing less than the future of mankind.

Also, Stanley Kiesel’s wonderfully subversive The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids had a profound influence on me.  That book woke me up to the possibility that authorities aren’t always right, nor do they always have a child’s best interest at heart.  Orwellian satire before I discovered Orwell.

Today there’s a long list of influences: Jonathan Carroll, Neil Gaiman, Chuck Palahniuk, Iain Banks, Roger Zelazny, Mike Resnick, Jack Womack, Stephen Baxter, Vladimir Nabokov, William Hjortsberg, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler.

From graphic novels: Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, Mike Carey, David Lapham, Chris Ware.

Television: Jimmy McGovern, Shawn Ryan, Rod Serling, David Chase, Joss Whedon.

Movies: Ernest Lehman, Quentin Tarantino, Charlie Kaufman, Christopher Nolan.

I‘m probably forgetting lots of people.  There’s always a long list of books to read and shows to watch.  Right now, I’m reading John Scalzi’s The Ghost Brigades and having a great time with it.  John’s a clever, skillful storyteller and man, is he prolific.

Before turning your hand to novels, you worked in Hollywood for many years writing screenplays and teleplays.  How did you first get your start in Hollywood?

Incredible luck.  I’m an undergrad in UCLA Film School, and I show a script I’ve written to Richard Walter, head of the screenwriting program.  He calls me in to his office, and I’m expecting him to give notes, but no, he loves the script and asks if I’d mind if he shows it to an agent.  I don’t mind at all.  The very next day, that agent calls me to set up a meeting.  Two days later I’m signed.  We go out with the script and suddenly I’m taking meetings all over town.  A production company options my script.  This company also happens to own the rights to a science fiction classic: Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game.  Would I be interested in adapting it?  I jump at the chance.  Though the project doesn’t get off the ground (and, sadly, still hasn’t), my Ender’s Game script really gets my career going.  I’m off and running, adapting other SF novels, and along the way my agent suggests I pitch to Jeri Taylor at Star Trek: TNG.  That pitch becomes a story sale, “Attached.”  Off the strength of the Ender’s Game script, Jeri asks me to write the teleplay as well.

It’s kind of funny that you would end up writing for Star Trek, considering that Star Trek made use of the Voyager probe in the storyline of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and then later, of course, had a spin-off series called Voyager.  Did your affiliation with the probe ever come up during any of your interactions with the cast and crew?

Amazingly, no.

Since you’ve written scripts for Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, might you write a Star Trek novel someday?  Or do you plan to stick with original stuff for the time being?

No plans for a Star Trek novel at this time, but perhaps somewhere down the road.  I’m a fan of Gene Roddenberry’s mythology.  The Trek universe is a great setting, and certainly there were Next Generation and Voyager episodes I wanted to write that never reached production.  Ideas that were too weird, too dark, too sweeping, or too expensive to produce on the small screen might work better as novels.  Eventually, I ought to look through my old TV pitches, but it’s the original stuff that’s calling to me right now.

Do you have any plans to return to Hollywood?  Has there been any interest in your novels as potential film projects?

Yes, and yes.  Producers have come knocking, but we’ve yet to make a deal.  I’ve worked out a treatment, and we’ll be pitching that sometime in the next few months.  Between now and then, I’m finishing up a new screenplay—something original and totally unrelated to the trilogy.  Since writing Idlewild, I’ve tried to balance the novel writing with the scriptwriting, but I think the trilogy has taken the lion’s share of my focus during the past four years.  The new script will restore the balance a bit, and I’ve been enjoying stretching my screenwriter muscles again.  It’s science fiction, but more comedic than any other script I’ve written.  It’s making me laugh, and that’s a good sign.

You’ve also done some work in videogames and other media.

I’ve been privileged to write in a variety of formats: screenplays, teleplays, novels, short stories, videogames, public service announcements, etc.  Each requires a slightly different skill set.  Because games are interactive, there’s challenge in trying to think like the gamer, anticipating the many ways in which he’ll try to pursue his objectives, and then scripting moments that meet or confound those expectations.  That’s fun.

Zork Nemesis: The Forbidden Lands is the best known of my game projects; it’s the darkest of that series, and I’m happy with how it turned out.  The original Zork text adventure was a favorite of mine back in the day, so it was a treat to work on one of its descendants.

Currently, a software development studio is commissioning concept art for a story I’ve worked out; they’re sending me amazing renders of soldiers in futuristic body armor.  It’s a very cool project, and I hope we can find funding for it.

I’ve also contributed to alternate reality games over the years, most recently with OurColony for the Xbox 360.

Games that don’t outwardly appear to be games, fake websites that look real, media that blurs the (already blurry) line between scripted and real world events—this appeals to my sense of whimsy.

Idlewild and Edenborn have been translated into Portuguese, and you traveled to Portugal in November of last year for the Fórum Fantástico.  Do you have a large following there?  And what did you think of your travels?  Have you done much other traveling?

I’m still stunned by the trip to Portugal.  There’s a strange feeling of coming full circle.  In 2003 I was an unpublished novelist, and [in 2005] one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman, was reading Idlewild in Portugal.  That alone was amazing.  But in 2005 for my books to be translated into Portuguese and me flown out there to take interviews with the Lisbon media and speak with Portuguese fans?  If you’d told me that back when I was writing Idlewild, I wouldn’t have believed it.

Everyone in Portugal treated me with such kindness and hospitality.  I can’t possibly say enough about what a great time I had.  Lisbon is a beautiful city, and I immediately fell in love with the monuments to exploration, the fado music, the coffee and the beer.  I’m very grateful to my publishers, Editorial Presença, and to Rogério Ribeiro, who organized the convention.  I’d love to go back sometime soon, hopefully with a better command of Portuguese.

I’d never been to Portugal before, though I did wind up traveling quite a lot as a kid.  Cruise lines wanted my father to lecture on the water, so they struck a deal where in exchange for those lectures, he and his family could travel free.  So I spent my school vacations going to Central America, or the Netherlands, or the South Pacific.  Traveling gave me an appreciation for other cultures, and a sense of globalism and commonality.  Looking back on those trips, I believe they nourished my optimism—something I treasure very much, despite how cynical I can sometimes be.

What would you do with a zombie army?

Pratt: My house would be kept so clean! Except for the bits of zombie falling off here and there. Seriously, though, what wouldn’t I do? Zombies for all the menial tasks I hate! (Nothing involving food prep, natch, but yardwork? Definitely.) Plus, I would have the single greatest haunted house in the world each Halloween.
 

Read the whole interview!

The story concerns a fledging auction agent who unwittingly gets involved with a circle of book lovers who are considering sending a book back in time, Miller said. "As the story develops, the protagonist discovers that the glittering world he has chosen, of high-stakes auction and finance, cannot sustain him and he gravitates toward his new circle of friends whom he feels are more genuine," she said. "They also ultimately betray him, and the unfolding of the narrative involves the choice the protagonist makes, given these experiences, when history has been changed and he has the chance to change it back."

Miller has a tendency to try to distill what matters from all of her experiences and the main character of the story does this too, she said. "And of course, [like the protagonist,] I love books. A life lived without a dialogue with the characters in books would be impoverished indeed."

Most of Miller’s research covered time travel theories and the physics, or lack thereof, underlying them, she said. " I also did some research on B.M. Bower’s relationship with Russell," she said. "In the story I use [one of the character's] knowledge of the relationship between the western writer B.M. Bower and her illustrator, Charles Russell, to illustrate the kind of knowledge a true book lover would have versus a collector’s. I had read some of Bower’s novels before and of course had seen Russell’s illustrations of her work, but I didn’t know if the writer and artist were close enough for the artist to have spent the enormous time necessary for him to have illustrated a set of her collected works with fore edge paintings.  During my research, I discovered that they were indeed close friends and that they lived near each other for a time in a California writer and artist community. Given this information, I felt free to create a fictional set of her works replete with the paintings."

"Retrospect" is Miller’s first published piece of fiction. She reports that she’s currently working on a fantasy novel about alchemy.

Slush Survivor bonus questions

Title: Retrospect | Word Count: 9,571
Genre: Science Fiction | Time to write it: 4 months

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

I write a column for the local newspaper and do freelance writing gigs. Recently I wrote a section for Fodor’s Colorado 2008.

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

I submitted the first story I wrote to Sewanee Review. It was about fishing and was set in Louisiana. It was pretty bad. I’d be embarrassed by it now. They did ask to see a rewrite but somehow I never got around to it. I was working and going to college then and had a little too much on my plate.

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

Short stories, poetry and my novel.

Why do you write SF/fantasy instead of some other genre?

I think you have a lot more freedom to experiment with language and ideas with fantasy and science fiction than with other genres.

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

A Canticle for Leibowitz, 9.

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

Ray Bradbury, Charles De Lint, George R.R. Martin, George Eliot, Conrad, Christopher Morley, W.B. Yeats

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

My novels, I hope!

The origin of the story, Macdonald said, comes from a line in Land of Mist and Snow, in which one of the characters, Captain William R. Sharps, USN, says, in a letter to Commodore Vanderbilt: "I found the lost ur-text of the Grey Book (in the wine cellar of a fortress in Carpatho-Ruthenia — an amusing story, worth telling over brandy and cigars, but not germane to my present communication), and bent my energies toward transcribing and translating those portions which had been purged from the younger MSS."

But the reader never does hear that "amusing story" in the course of the novel, Macdonald said. "In fact, I had no idea when writing the novel what the story was that he had to tell. But that line sat in the back of my mind and the story asked to be told."

The protagonist of the story (and a character in the novel), William R. Sharps is a mad philologist, Macdonald said. "He wasn’t mad originally, but studying old texts will do that to a fellow. He was an undergraduate at Miskatonic, got his PhD at Harvard, and since has been trying to prove that the text of the Grey Book was altered between its manuscript stage and its publication in the 15th century," he said. "Then he had to learn what the book said, then, like a fool, he had to try it out. Didn’t four years at Miskatonic teach him anything?"

The events of this story are set some fifty years before the events in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Macdonald said. "The biggest concern I had, and the one we went both ways on, was whether to use the common English name of the city Vienna, or its German name, Wien. We eventually went with Vienna to avoid slowing the readers down, even though the character would undoubtedly have said ‘Wien,’" he said. "When I started drafting the story, I didn’t know any more about it than Sharps had put in his letter to Vanderbilt, so I knew where I had to end up, but no more than that."

For Doyle, the personal aspect of the story came from how it related to her experiences while studying Old English and Old Icelandic for her doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania, she said. "In the course of which I hung out with a number of mad philologists and read the works of even more of them," she said. "There are some who might even say that I am a mad philologist, but I prefer to think of myself as yet another of the sf/fantasy field’s renegade medievalists."

In the story, Macdonald wanted to use the actual folklore of Romanian vampires, rather than the vampires that Bram Stoker invented, he said. "I’d wanted to tie in ‘the Hungarian gentleman’ from Varney the Vampyre there somewhere, (which would have been roughly contemporaneous), but didn’t see any way to bring him in directly."

Other research consisted of looking at photos of the city of Bistrita, Romania, and some tourist information, Macdonald said. "Along the way I learned that St. George’s Eve is the Romanian equivalent of the American Halloween, that Romanian vampires are red-haired and ruddy-cheeked and have no fear of daylight, and a couple more details–[they have] two hearts, for example."

Macdonald said he’s gotten to like Sharps a lot more since writing about his earlier adventures. "I’m wondering if he might not have another story or two in him," he said.

"If Angels Fight" starts with the unnamed narrator being asked by Carol Bannon, the scion of a Boston political dynasty to help her find her long lost brother Mark who was a childhood friend of the narrator. "The narrator has helped the family with this several times over the years. The difficulty tracing Mark Bannon is that to all intents and purposes he died some years before," Bowes said. "The rest of the story is the narrators search in the byways of intrigue and politics and his memories of Irish Boston in the 1950′s when politics was a sport, a hobby, a way of life."

The story–like Gatsby’s or Sherlock Holmes’–is a narrator describing to us a character who fascinates him and whom he tries to fully understand, Bowes said. "I knew several kids whose fathers were in politics. Or I should say whose families were in politics, because the political life tended to engulf the entire family. A couple of the kids resented it, most just accepted it as a way of life," he said. "Thus it is with Mark Bannon, my protagonist whose father is the Speaker of the Massachusetts House and an expert politician. Mark is mainly an unexceptional kid, some would say dull normal. But there are flashes of something beyond brilliance."

Many of the incidents, from the appearance of JFK to the youthful escapades of climbing on the courthouse ledge, the rescue on the icy covered river, the episode in the half built houses on the site of the old Honey Fitz mansion were based pretty solidly on real events, or at least on Bowes’s memory of them, and that even some of the modern day scenes set in New York City, like the description of that 14th Street bar on a Saturday afternoon and the robbery at S. Klein’s On the Square that follows, are based on real incidents or at least real anecdotes, Bowes said. As a result, the story took much longer and was much harder to write than he had anticipated. "I think it was the problem of integrating Markey Bannon in his two aspects–body and soul into one tale," he said. "I hope I’ve succeeded. I owe a lot to the members of the 8th of February writing workshop to which I belong–Bob Howe, Andrea Kail, Barbara Krasnoff–and my friends Chris Barzak and especially Paul Witcover for their help."

As part of his research for the story, Bowes reread (or, in this case listened to on CD) Shakespeare’s The Arkangel Richard the Second, especially the scene of his return to England. "I loved Shakespeare’s history plays when I was a kid–maybe because the characters are simpler than in the later plays and this one seemed to speak about the Bannon family though I can’t entirely tell you why or how," he said. "It’s where I got my title, ‘then, if angels fight/Weak men must fall.’"

"If Angels Fight" will be a chapter in a mosaic novel Bowes is working on which will be called Dust Devil on Quiet Street. His 9/11 story, "There’s a Hole in the City," will be the opening chapter in the novel.

This is Bowes’s fourteenth appearance in F&SF, he notes. "I’m really happy you took this story," he said, "and that you have another one in the same series: ‘I Needs Must Part the Policeman Said,’ forthcoming."

"Balancing Accounts" is Cambias’s attempt to update an old space-opera trope: the scruffy, hand-to-mouth space merchant crew. "I tried to make it work without violating physical laws or realistic economics," he said. "That meant it had to be within the Solar System (no faster-than-light drives) and couldn’t involve a human crew."

The protagonist, Annie, is a robot rocket tug who hauls cargo among the moons of Saturn.  "She’s autonomous and ‘incentivized’ — her purpose is to generate income for her owners back on Earth and Mars, and can more or less do whatever she chooses in order to do so," Cambias said. "But Annie has learned that there’s more to life than just earning micrograms of Helium-3; she works just as hard to accumulate ‘non-quantifiable assets’ like the goodwill of her fellow robots, a reputation for honest dealing, and what a human might call friendship."

This was the most "number-crunchy," hard-SF story Cambias has written, he said. "I did the math for everything — designing Annie’s performance parameters, figuring travel time, even fuel consumption," Cambias said. "Since the whole point was to write a story with no ‘magic’ or rubber science, I felt honor-bound to make everything as accurate as I could."

As research, Cambias made extensive use of Winchell Chung’s superb "Atomic Rockets" Web site. "Every SF writer should have [that site] bookmarked," Cambias said.

Lately, Cambias has become interested in how one can be moral without a supernatural or religious framework defining what is good, and so that factored into the story as well. "In the story I try to show that being a good person works for Annie as a purely self-interested logical machine," he said. "Good works."

Cambias reports that he a blast writing "Balancing Accounts," and is planning to write a sequel. But first, readers can look forward to his "The Dinosaur Train," which should be appearing in a forthcoming issue of F&SF sometime soon.

The February 2008 issue of F&SF is on sale now.

Muir joins the Toronto branch of the Explorers Club and pores over maps of the remote corners of the world where he believes the creatures must exist. "Then he has a revelation. Perhaps the creatures needed to live close to man where they could learn from him while, at the same time, avoiding discovery. Perhaps they were right there in Toronto," Powell said. "So he begins his search closer to home, using all his free time to find the creatures. He decides they graze on the common ground ivy Canadians call Creeping Charlie and because ‘megamensalope’ is too much of a mouthful and because we are what we eat he names his quarry ‘Creeping Charlie.’ His search costs him his marriage and his life in more ways that one."

For Powell, it is often very difficult to tell where a story idea comes from, but not in this case. "Frequently they come in several pieces. But as it happens in this case I can tell you the exact source. George Orwell, of Animal Farm fame, uses almost the exact quote about the smartest animal in one of his journalistic essays. Only the word ‘megamensalope’ was my invention," he said. "I hoped to be able to tell you the exact essay but after skipping through the four volumes I couldn’t come up with it. In any event they are fine reading and I would recommend them to everyone. Orwell was a very intelligent human being."

The most difficult part of writing the story was the fact that obsessed characters tend to be one-dimensional, Powell said. "I hope I was able to overcome this by showing Muir’s sympathy for the creatures he is searching for and his determination to protect them when he found them and hopefully becoming their spokesman," he said.

George Muir is a bookish and rather thin-skinned man, Powell said. "When he first decided to find Creeping Charlie and told his friends over beer they laughed at him and he resolved never to tell anyone again. But he is also a modest man. He does not see himself as a rocket scientist and hopes that will help him communicate with the smarter among his quarry. But he is methodical and determined," he said. "I was going to the university at the same time as Muir and during the construction of the Toronto subway. Other than that I don’t think we had anything else in common. I may be bookish but I am not modest."

Powell didn’t have to do any research for the story, he said. "However I do monitor the Toronto newspapers on line and a while back I read an item about the phantom subway station under the Queen and Young St. station which I was happy to use in the story," he said.

As noted in the header notes to this story, much of Powell’s output in his career has been in the mystery field, but he notes that a fair number of his short stories have a fantasy element. "One of my most popular, ‘A Dirge for Clowntown,’ involves Inspector Bozo of the Clowntown police investigating mime-bashing and the murder of a clown struck in the face with a poisoned custard pie," Powell said. "I’ve also written about the theft of the hen that lays golden eggs, Santas murdered and murderous and most recently about a slain jack-o’lantern."

The January 2008 issue of F&SF is on sale now. To learn more about James Powell, visit his web site.

Like most of her stories, this one was brewing for a long time before it came together. "I think the original seed was a lecture Michael Swanwick gave at a workshop I once attended that he called ‘How to Win a Hugo,’" Nestvold said. "The gist of it was to have a character stranded somewhere in the solar system in a desperate situation with next to no options. The character should then solve the problem using science–so base the story on a combination of a ton of research and whatever hand-waving you need to get past the bumps. Of course, this impressed me, especially given the promise Michael made, and it was in the back of my mind for quite a few years before it came together with the idea of telling a story in a series of database entries."

This story is told entirely through the Mars rover computer system’s responses to the protagonist’s queries. "I always tend to take a lot of notes for my research-heavy stories, but in this story, the ‘narrative’ itself was relatively straightforward–I simply had to take one option after another away from the ‘protagonist,’" Nestvold said. "Most of the work was in the research, getting all the details of possible near-future Mars expeditions right, deciding on a perfect site for a perfect accident,  that kind of thing. The actual writing went surprisingly fast once I had the plan and the research down. In real life, I translate and test computer programs and manuals, and I found it very easy to slip into the role."

The main challenge in writing the story was the research, Nestvold said. "I put my first couple of paragraphs aside for several months, sure that no one would want to read a short story without a protagonist. I guess at some point I convinced myself there wasn’t much to lose, since most stories don’t sell anyway, and I went back to all the materials on Mars and Mars explorations I had collected, read up on it again, and just started writing the damn thing. … I think part of what freed me to finally write the story was doing enough research to know the kinds of problems that could create the Catch-22 situation I needed."

In order to write the story, Nestvold had to imagine herself in the situation of the tourist battling the "help" system. "So I guess you could say I’m the gal who tells the computer ‘fuck you,’" she said. "It was really fun writing this story. Once I got past my own worries and had done enough research to get the protagonist in really deep shit, it flowed. Apparently the voice of a completely unhelpful help system is something I can relate to.

The January 2008 issue of F&SF is on sale now.

"On his way back to Chicago from a hit in tiny Enfield, Illinois, Conlin turns off the interstate for lunch and wanders into a small town among the fields and woods—a town that isn’t on his map," Durbin said. "He quickly discovers that he’s arrived on the day of the annual Hallowe’en parade, apparently a major event for this community; and he is intrigued by references to someone called ‘the Bone Man,’ a dancing skeleton that shows up every year as a kind of Grand Master of the parade."

Conlin’s curiosity is piqued by the locals’ apparent combination of dread and reverence for this figure, and especially by photos he’s shown: photos too old to be digital hoaxes, which indeed seem to depict an animated skeleton, Durbin said. "As he watches the town’s preparations for the evening, Conlin is drawn back into his childhood memories of the season and the sinister holiday for which he’s always had an affinity," he said. "Of course, Conlin, in the midst of the dark revelry, meets the Bone Man; and the specter is very real; and the encounter leaves Conlin forever changed (ominous chuckle)."

The story is rooted in Durbin’s love of Hallowe’en, he said. "In the autumn of 2005, I was going through a difficult time as my parents faced the serious problems of old age; I was between major writing projects and feeling out of sorts. A friend suggested I write a Hallowe’en story to get myself back into the rhythm of producing something. I tried it, and ‘The Bone Man’ is what resulted," Durbin said. "My mom passed away when I’d reached the middle of the first draft. That was in late October, and I’ll never forget the Hallowe’en of that year, how it felt. So for me this story will always have associations of grief, loss, and a sense of unreality or disconnectedness."

Durbin’s mental state that particular year added something to the story that wouldn’t have been there at any other time—a sort of mournful nostalgia that’s alight with the bright, eerie images and feelings we recall from our childhood Hallowe’ens, he said. "There’s an unspoken sense of yearning in the story, a longing to go back, to crawl inside the warm, inviting dream—which is, I’d say, a large part of our enjoyment of Hallowe’en," Durbin said. "I’m talking about all of us, kids and adults, anyone who loves the holiday. We’re groping and grasping after a sense of shivery wonder that’s fluttering in the shadows just beyond our workaday lives. We glimpse it now and then. We just want to get one hand on it for a few minutes on the night of jack-o’-lanterns. That’s what all our decorating and pumpkin-carving is for; we’re setting up the moment, hoping that squeaky inner trapdoor will open into the past, the unseen, the half-dreamed…and raise the hair on our scalps."

Conlin’s a professional killer, but of course Durbin had no way of knowing what really leads a person into that profession or what his mental landscape is like, so he supposed that a hit man is very much like a writer: a being whose nature is to observe, minutely observe every detail of what’s happening around him. "The success and survival of writers and hit men depends on that ability. That’s combined in Conlin with a complete absence of any moral sense—which liberates him. He can do what other people can’t do because he’s not afraid of any consequences," Durbin said. "One of my close friends is an atheist, and a lot of what I understand of his worldview went into Conlin. (Yes, I apologized to my friend for turning him into a cold-blooded killer.) Conlin thinks of Hallowe’en as the one honest holiday, because it comes with no hypocrisy; it acknowledges the universality of death, which he sees as the one truth in life."

To get the details right in the story, Durbin had to do some window shopping. "I had to go ‘shopping’ on-line for Conlin’s gun," he said. "That was fun, but it was a big responsibility, because I know you have to get the details of things like that exactly right. Mr. Van Gelder (the editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction) was very conscientious in asking me about it and double-checking the source I’d used. He also had me look up the kind of car Conlin drives, to make sure it really does have the speedometer with a needle that I wrote about, not a digital speedometer. I was able to find both a description and a photo of the dash board. Ah, the wonders of the Internet!"

As an homage, Durbin borrowed some scenery and atmosphere from Sauk City, Wisconsin for the story. "My first novel, Dragonfly, was published by Arkham House. A couple years ago I decided to visit Arkham House, and I drove through Sauk City, where it’s located," he said. "I had to ask directions at the local post office. In ‘The Bone Man,’ some of the geography of the town is cut-and-pasted from Sauk City. Arkham House really is on Lueders Road, which runs along the far edge of town; there really is a picturesque cemetery (where in real life August Derleth is buried); and at the end of Arkham House’s wooded driveway is a sign saying ‘Place of Hawks,’ [which became] ‘Place of Crows’ for the story."

Durbin reports that his story “Shadowbender” is slated to appear in the next issue of Ozment’s House of Twilight, and that he’s sold a story entitled "World’s End" to Black Gate. His agent is currently shopping his young-adult novel, The Witching Wild, and forthcoming in April of next year is a young-adult fantasy novelette which will appear as a four-part serial in Cricket Magazine.

"The Bone Man" appears in the December 2007 issue of F&SF, which is on sale now.

"It’s a riff on an old theme — the skilled protagonist who’s called on to travel to a strange locale to do a job that only that protagonist can do, and who ends up changed by the experience," Moles said. "’Finisterra’ would mostly make sense, I think, to any SF reader back to the Golden Age — apart from the setting, it would probably make sense to Joseph Conrad and Mark Twain."

The first inspiration for "Finisterra" was an illustration called "The Engineer," Moles said. "[The illustration was] an homage to Vermeer’s ‘Geographer,’ by my good friend Lara Wells," he said. "[It's of] a woman in early modern costume working at a window, in a room full of illustrations and models for airships and Da Vinci flying machines. A woman in Da Vinci’s time wouldn’t have had the opportunities Da Vinci had, and Lara wanted to capture that — her Engineer is trapped in that room, dreaming of flight but unable to fly. The character of Bianca Nazario came directly from that image, though I transplanted her to a different time and place, and gave her a means of — qualified — escape."

Both of Moles’s grandfathers were pilots, he said. "And I’ve always loved the sky, flying, stories about flying — Saint-Exupéry, Richard Bach, Hayao Miyazaki with his wonderful skyscapes. The second inspiration for ‘Finisterra’ was simply an extraordinary sky that I saw once from the window of a 757 somewhere over Montana or Idaho," Moles said. "You can always see farther from altitude, of course, but that day it really did look as if there was no ground and no horizon. I knew I had a setting then; the only question then was what story to tell there."

The story’s protagonist, Bianca Nazario, is a woman to whom life hasn’t given any good choices, Moles said. "She’s been born into a marginalized group (the Christian minority) in a marginal place (the hinterlands of North America) in a marginal society (a Muslim-dominated future Earth) that has chosen, or been made (opinions differ) to revert to a technological but pre-industrial existence, where machines are handcrafted and offworlders, or extrañados as Bianca was raised to call them, are both a source of wonders and a focus of mistrust."

Social groups under pressure tend to cling to, or revert to, old, conservative norms and cultural expectations, Moles said. "What’s expected of Bianca is that she’ll marry young and raise children," he said. "When that doesn’t happen, Bianca’s culture has no backup plan for her. Certainly, what she wants to do, which is make airplanes like her father, is out of the question. So when she gets the chance to escape the trap life has put her in, she jumps at it, even though on some level she knows there must be a razor blade hidden in the apple. But at the same time, even though her family and her culture have been more a source of grief to her than anything else, she never forgets who she is or where she comes from."

The most personal aspect of "Finisterra," for Moles, is the Bianca’s character, he said. "It’s true that a woman in the developed world today has many more opportunities than she would have had a hundred years ago, or even fifty, but I also think that in American society particularly, we — men and women both — lie to ourselves about how much freedom and opportunity we have," Moles said. "I know quite a few people who have found themselves trapped the way Bianca is, between what they want and what the people around want for them, between their dreams and the economic reality of life under 21st-century capitalism. Some are lucky enough to escape the trap — not always through radical lateral moves like Bianca’s, but often enough. Others are still stuck. And all of us, like Bianca, find ourselves having to make moral compromises to survive, whether we admit it or not."

As research for the story, Moles said he probably spent more time reading about Islam than anything else, even though that aspect of the plot ended up staying mostly in the background. "Of course, times being what they are, it’s a pretty topical subject in any case," he said. "Reza Aslan’s No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam is particularly good, for anyone trying to move beyond the Hollywood and cable news caricatures and get a sense of where Islam’s come from and what a modern, globalized, post-industrial Muslim society looks like. I also spent quite a while scribbling on graph paper, trying to remember high school trig, trying to figure out just how big Sky was and just what you’d be able to see from where."

Future projects for Moles include a novella from PS Publishing called Seven Cities of Gold, due out sometime in 2009, he said. "[It's] a kind of alternate history Heart of Darkness about a Japanese woman doctor — not so very far removed from Bianca Nazario, in many ways — going up the Mississippi, in a North America at war between invading European Muslims and a mestizo Christian culture, with Japanese relief workers caught in the middle," Moles said.

He’s also currently working on a novel, tentatively titled Viola’s War, he said. "[It's] a philosophical space opera / thriller set in the same universe as ‘Finisterra’ and ‘Planet of the Amazon Women‘; it’s closer to the latter than the former, but a major section does take place on Sky — mostly in the crowded world of the elevator stations and vacuum balloons, that ‘Finisterra’ alludes to but doesn’t really show," Moles said.

The December 2007 issue of F&SF is on sale now.