Interview with Award Winning Author Nancy Kress

by Naamenblog

Nancy Kress is one of the best SF authors in the business, her breakthrough work, the short story Beggars In Spainearned her both a Hugo and a Nebula and spawned her famous Beggars trilogy. Since then she’s kept busy writing over twenty fiction books, three books about writing, a regular column for Writers Digest and winning of multiple Nebulas including one at the ceremony held in April of this year. Her latest work, the novel Dogs which is forthcoming from Tacyhon press and she was kind enough to grant Feminist SF – the Blog an interview.

Hello Ms. Kress thank you so much for taking the time for this interview.

No, no problem at all.

So your new novel is coming out from Tacyhon press next month (July 2008) do you want to tell our readers a little about it?

Okay. Well Dogs begins with the premise that in a small town, Tyler, that sits on the border between Maryland and Northern Virginia there are dogs that are suddenly coming down with a virus. The virus is similar to rabies in that it can penetrate the blood/brain barrier. So these dogs are turning from family pets into vicious killers overnight.

Now you can imagine what the government would do in that sort of a case, they throw a quarantine around Tyler and move in the CDC to try and investigate the pathogen, if it is a pathogen. They don’t know at this point if it’s environmental or if it’s microbial or what so they just start rounding up all the dogs.

It’s one thing to kill a billion chickens in Asia because you think they might be carrying the Avian flu but it’s quite another to ask Americans to surrender their pets, especially when some of those dogs aren’t showing any signs of infection. Also in that part of the world a lot of people are armed and they do not wish to give up their pets. There’s also an ex-FBI agent who has settled in that part of the world. She’s left Washington D.C. and resigned from the bureau because she kept getting passed over for promotions. She’s convinced the reason for this is that she married an Arab, who is now dead. Her husband died in a traffic accident that was in no way terrorist related, just a drunk 17 year old on the way home from a basketball game.

So she has moved to Tyler and she has a dog, so when this all this breaks loose she starts investigating. She’s also been receiving some very strange emails and it’s clear that there’s more going on here than meets the eye.

Sounds absolutely amazing! Speaking of your writing you’re very well-known as a hard-SF writer but in your works the focus is always more on human interactions/relationships than the science itself.

Well that’s what interests me, the effect that science and technology have on human beings. This book in some ways is like my other work in that it has a biological basis which I’ve worked out as carefully as I can. In other ways it’s a little bit different because it’s not really SF, it’s a bio-thriller. So I’m going after the thriller audience, I hope.

It does sound like a bio-thriller, unlike your Beggars trilogy or the Probability trilogy which are pretty firmly SF.

Well that’s partly because it takes place in the present, it doesn’t take place in any future. Also it only covers a couple of months so it doesn’t extend into the future the way that Beggars in Spain does.

Now, you’ve always had a very scientific slant to your works, especially the science of gene modification. This science plays a huge role in the Beggars trilogy but also shows up in the Probability trilogy with the character of Mabret. Do you think that gene modification is something that’s very important within SF? Especially in the coming century when it looks like it’s right around the corner?

Oh absolutely, and in someways it’s already here. It’s creeping in, in a way that people are not noticing because it’s doing it through the fertility clinics. Even now, if you go into a fertility clinic and a couples’ sperm and eggs are harvested, or perhaps you use donated sperm or eggs a group of them will be fertilized in a petri dish and they will be gene scanned for major diseases before any of them are implanted in the mother. And they will pick those that are free of the markers for Huntington’s, Tay-Sachs or any of the other diseases that we are positive we know

That’s step one and it’s happening now and nobody’s really noticing.

Step two, as we start to identify from the Human Genome Project what more of these genes encode for, we’ll start being able to choose from a bunch of fertilized embryos those that have markers for things that are not disease related.

Suppose for instance that you’re choosing a male embryo and we knew where the markers for height were, which we don’t yet. In this society for a boy to be 5’4 confers a certain amount of disadvantage. So you have two embryos, one is going to be 5’4 and one is going to be 6’1, the parents will choose the 6’1 embryo. So we haven’t changed any genes yet but we are crossing a line from scanning for diseases to scanning for desirable characteristics. If it’s not happening now it’s just around the corner.

The step after that is to knock out the genes we know how to replace. We know how to do this, we do it in mice all the time to create knock-out mice for various research programs. It’s not legal in the United States at this point but it is legal in England so it could be coming here. Or parents who really, really want it could leave the country.

So it starts with the fertility clinics and it will just creep in. It happens step by step so people hardly even notice it. In 1978 I remember the big fuss over the first baby that was created with in-vitro fertilization, Louise Brown. There were all these ridiculous editorials, “we are messing with nature, creating monsters, creating non-humans” and now there are hundreds of thousands of people who have been created in-vitro. You might be one of them, ask your mother.

*laughter*

When you talk about traits being knocked out or scanned for I remember the backlash, that’s still going on, when doctors found the gene for dwarfism and started scanning for it.

Funny you should say that Naamen because I just finished a novella about that, that I sent off to Asimov’s last week.

That’s actually why I bring it up. I read the post on your blog where you talk about writing from a point-of-view you don’t occupy and I’m wondering if the science of dwarfism comes into the novella at all?

Very much, yes.

And in that same post you talk about writing from an identity that’s not your own or that’s very different from how you were raised and the problems there. From the very beginning you’ve had People of Color in your works, such as the Sharifi family in the Beggars trilogy. Is writing from other people’s perspectives something you’ve always tried to do?

It is, but I try to do it as respectfully as possible. One of the Point-of-View characters in one of my own favorite novels, Stinger, is an African-American woman. After I finished the first draft I asked three of my girlfriends who are African-American to read it to see if I’d made a fool of myself, or if I’d gotten anything wrong, or if she was a viable character. They all said she was viable, although one of them said to lose the sunscreen and they corrected a few things about hair. But other than that they validated it.
So I try hard to catch that point of view, what I don’t want to do is create more stereotypes.

Yes, which seems to be a hard line for some authors to follow.

I don’t want to create the “good” stereotypes either though, I want to avoid them as much as the “bad” ones.

Yeah, you want to avoid stereotypes altogether and create an original character.

Exactly.

Now, you’ve written over twenty novels, also three acclaimed books on writing, and numerous novellas and short stories, including one of my favorites: The Most Famous Little Girl in the World.

Oh really that’s one of your favorites?

I absolutely love that story, the time-jumps fit so perfectly and highlight the emotional aspects of the story so well. It’s amazing to me.

Oh, I’m so pleased because that story kind of sank like a stone. I’m pleased that somebody responded to it.

I love it, all the interconnections and the petty jealousies that come back to haunt the cousins later in life and the way that they grow and stop feeding into that cycle eventually with age and wisdom, that’s one of my favorite things.

Well thank you.

And in that story and your other work one of the things you do is create female characters that have complex relationships with each other- sisters, cousins, friends. Is that something that’s very important for your work?

Oh yes it is. I have a sister and we’re very close, and I’m not saying there isn’t a certain amount of rivalry that goes on between us but we are very close and my girlfriends are also very important to me. And I think that women – well of course I wouldn’t know not being a man- but my experience with women is that they seem to offer each other a lot more emotional support than men offer each other. So it’s a fertile ground for fiction.

Yeah, definitely. And those relationships between women, are those the ones you find most interesting in how they can be altered with science and technology?

It’s one of the ones that’s the most interesting to me. The parent-child one also, I’ve written a lot about that. I have three children.

And do you think having those kinds of close bonds is what interested you in writing about them?

I think everything that happens to a writer and everything a writer reads all kind of gets dropped into their well of unconscious. And in there it breeds, it crossbreeds, it mutates so that when it comes out it’s almost impossible to trace any single characteristic to any single influence. It’s more complex than that.

Getting back to what you were saying about the parent-child bond. You work with it wonderfully in your novel Dancing On Air where you have a mother-daughter relationship being altered.

Yeah, but even in Beggars In Spain Leisha’s relationship with her father is one of the things that shapes her.

You’ve said in other interviews how your biggest influence is Ursula K. LeGuin.

I think she walks on water.

You’ll hear no disagreement from me. Are there any other authors that you feel influenced you in the way they write.

People that have influenced me, Bruce Sterling – even though we write very differently – there’s something bracing about his writing that influences me. Something global in scope and I like that. Karen Joy Fowler is another one in use of language, that I’m in awe of and again I don’t write like that but I read her with enormous pleasure.

I also read a great deal of mainstream work and some writers that are my favorites are Anne Tyler, and for plot I actually like John Grisham

Really?

You’re not supposed to admit that but I just did.

*laughter*

No I understand, the Pelican Brief was one of my favorite books growing up and I could never explain why.

I like King of Torts- it’s a perfect rise and fall story.

Speaking of writing and writing influences, you’ve written three wonderful books on the art of writing and have a column in Writers Digest, so what’s your own schedule with writing? Do you set aside certain parts of the day?

It’s morning. I’m a morning person and I get up, have my coffee, read the newspaper, do the New York Times Crossword and then I’m ready to work. If it’s going well I’ll work for several hours and if it’s not I’ll work for an hour or an hour and a half and then give up.

You’ve also spoken about being an organic writer, unlike Connie Willis who plots and outlines her works-

She not only plots and outlines, she writes it out of order. I have no idea how she can do that.

It’s amazing to me, especially because when you read her books the prose is so tight, there are no cracks to show in what order the chapters were written.

Yeah I don’t know how she can do that, I could never do that. I don’t know what the ending is, even novels I don’t know what the ending is going to be before I get to it. If I did know I don’t think I’d be as interested in writing them.

I’ve heard other authors say that as well, that once something is outlined rigorously they feel like it’s already been written so why bother. Do you think being an organic writer affects the tone of your writing? Are you surprised at some of the things that sometimes come out of your characters?

I don’t know if it affects the overall tone of the finished product but yes it’s surprising to me as I go along. Sometimes I don’t know what my characters are going to do. I’ve had people argue with me on this saying, ‘They can only do what you tell them to do.’ But it feels like I don’t know what they’re going to do. Of course it means a certain percentage of stories don’t work. I get two-thirds of the way through, which for me is the drop dead point if I don’t know then how it’s going to go I’m in trouble. Sometimes they just die because I can’t figure out what the ending should be or an appropriate ending at all. So the two-thirds of the way through point is critical for me.

We’ve talked about how your fiction often focuses on human relationships but I’ve also felt when reading your work that you deal with the idea of what makes us human. As in the Beggars trilogy with the SuperSleepless being so different from us in the way they think and deal with situations. Is that something you come back to often, the ethics of what makes us human?

Yes, in fact I wrote an entire novel that came out from Golden Gryphon a few years ago, actually one of my favorites of mine.

That would be Nothing Human, correct?

Yes, and that’s what the topic of the novel is, we’ve trashed the planet so badly that we can’t live on it anymore. This is in the future. So we genetically engineer our descendants to live on this wasted planet, and they look nothing like us. They don’t function like us. Are they human or not? They’re ours, they have our genes in them but they’re a completely different species. So I take the question to the ultimate degree, are they human or not? People who’ve read the book sometimes send me emails and say ‘Yes, they are.’ and sometimes send me emails saying ‘No, they’re not.’ So it’s left deliberately ambiguous.

In the twelve years since the end of the Beggars trilogy, which is considered by many to be your breakout work, how do you think your writing has changed or shifted?

I think the same things interest me that interested me always, which is why people are behaving the way they’re behaving? That’s the bottom line for all fiction, why are these people doing these things and what are the consequences of their doing these things?

However my fiction itself has changed in that it’s become much harder science fiction. If you read the science in Beggars in Spain there really isn’t much in detail. The consequences of it are there but the science itself is not. That has changed, I’ve become much more interested in the possibilities of actual science and I work a lot more with that now, which means researching a lot more because I have no scientific background.

How much research do you typically do for a novel? Do you sit down and do it all beforehand or do you research while you’re writing?

Both. I’ll do it ahead of time for the science, even for novellas. Fountain of Age which won this past Nebula is only a novella but I read four entire books on gypsies, on the Romany plus a lot of other minor stuff. In a way this is not a cost effective way to work

*laughter*

I read three entire books on dwarfs to write the novella I just sent to Asimov’s. Again it’s only a novella but once I get interested in a topic I want to keep going.

Is that why you have certain sciences/technologies reoccur in your work? Because you’ve done so much research on them that you want to show all the different aspects?

Yes, I think that is true.

So you were the Guest of Honor for WisCon 25 in 2001 and in your speech there you talked about second wave feminism and how that opened your mind to the possibilities of writing science fiction.

Were you there?

No but I read the transcript of it and in there you mention having step-daughters and a daughter-in-law who didn’t consider themselves feminist. I’m wondering if in the seven years since have you seen a change in the younger generation of female science-fiction writers and fans?

I think there are more women than ever writing science-fiction. I do notice that there are only four women on the Hugo ballot this year and there were none last year and that sent ripples through the community. I don’t think that’s necessarily emblematic of a trend. If you saw my blog you probably saw that I went through the entire SFWA directory.

Yes, I did see that.

Well I counted women authors and we have won more Nebulas that our numbers would seem to indicate and fewer Hugos. So it isn’t that I think we’re necessarily discriminated against but I think the Hugos which are voted on by fans have a larger percentage of teenage boys involved than the Nebulas. Their taste, as in movies, tends towards a certain kind of science fiction that maybe women write less.

Well you’ve won both a Hugo and multiple Nebulas and for certain people the importance put on awards can have a detrimental effect on the artwork being judged just because of the pressure to win one, do you find this to be true?

I don’t think they change the stories that get written because I think writers write what they can write. In other words the writers in my experience (and I include myself) that set out deliberately to cross genres or write a mainstream novel when they’re not mainstream writers almost never succeed. You write the stories you write because those are the stories that are in you and I don’t think the presence or absence of awards makes a difference to what gets written.

As to the attitudes and feelings of people in the science-fiction community, I think that those awards are a little bit blown out of proportion. I know writers who are extremely depressed because they’ve never won one. They’re won by small margins usually and they represent one kind of accolade but they don’t change the quality of the work in any way. The story is what it is and I think that that’s the important thing. And I do think we put too much emphasis on them.

I also wanted to talk about the way you create your characters, it seems like there’s never one true villain within the works. All the people who are ‘antagonists’ are not evil per say and often they are doing what they think is right. Is there a particular reason you do that?

Yes very much so. I think that pure evil is very rare, the kind of evil that destroys for the pleasure of destruction is really a very rare thing. I think if you’re going to create characters and figure out what makes them tick that has to include the destructive ones and once you figure out what makes them tick, they’re always justified to themselves. I mean even Hitler was justified to himself. Once you know their justification it can help you to create a stronger character. I actually think most of the problems in the world, a large percentage of them not all, result more from stupidity than actual evil. I really do, I think we have an idiot in the White House right now. I don’t think he’s evil I just think he’s dumber than a bucket of hair.

There are a lot of people who agree with you.

Yeah, so I think idiocy is a larger problem than evil and so I tend to focus on that.

Now I’m wondering what personally makes a novel feminist to you, is it the author identifying as feminist or some ideal in the work itself?

That’s an interesting question because I don’t really think that very much of my work is feminist in one sense but I think it is in another and I want to make a distinction between the two. There’s the kind of feminist fiction that focuses specifically on the way women are treated in a society and there’s been some extremely good fiction like this. For example, The Left Hand of Darknessis about gender, it’s about the issue- if you subtract gender what are you left with? Suzy McKee Charnas’ and Joanna Russ’ work is about gender, and so is Alice Sheldon’s (James Tiptree Jr.) but there’s another way to write science fiction which is just the assumption that women can do anything and therefore not make it about gender. Just make the characters who are female go ahead and do it.

I’ve heard that referred to as a post-feminist world and I suppose that’s one way of looking at it but even if you set your story in the here and now, a character who’s simply going ahead and getting it done without thinking about gender is in a way a feminist statement in and of itself. Because it takes for granted that women can do whatever they’re doing and I do write that.

I was a little surprised frankly to be asked to be a Guest of Honor at WisCon because I have not written the first kind of feminist science-fiction.

Yet there are many people who consider your work feminist because of the complex human relationships between female characters in them.

They’re not always pleasant relationships.

No, they’re not always pleasant but coming from the “classic” 50’s and 60’s science-fiction where women were more objects and had no kind of agency within the work, your work is supremely different.

Yes, that’s a good way to put it. I try to create female characters, well I don’t really try it just comes out naturally, that have agency, that do things and are struggling with the same kinds of problems and issues that male characters struggle with. In Dogs for instance there are two lead characters. Jess, a male Jess is the animal control officer for Tyler who’s used to dealing with skunks under porches and the occasional deer that’s gotten into the garden. So he’s in way over his head. The ex-FBI agent who is stronger and more competent than he is is female and that was not a deliberate decision. It’s just the way that the story got itself written.

There are also more traditional women in the book, there’s a nurse who’s very much a traditional female. So there’s a spectrum of female characters.

And I think that makes a work feminist in a way, having a spectrum of different women instead of just one type of woman.

I remember arguments in the 70’s and early 80’s among female science-fiction writers – I’m not going to name names – a couple of whom said that if you create weak female characters you are doing a disservice to the movement, so you can’t do that. I was never able to buy into that.

Because people do come in a spectrum.

Exactly and I have weak male characters too. Sometimes it’s the same character that’s weak in some ways and strong in others.

You’ve talked about how for you the novella is the perfect length and how that works out well for your writing style.

Of my four Nebulas, three of them have been for novelettes or novellas that just seem to be what suits me the best. I like it because you need only one plot, you don’t need a lot of subplots, but it’s long enough to create a whole world.

Is there anything you’re working on now besides the novella you just sent out?

Well I’m trying to do a short story right now but it’s not going real well. It’s that organic thing, I don’t know if this one will make it or not. I’m going to be teaching at Odyssey in a few weeks and I don’t want to start a big piece before I have to interrupt it for eight days. Actually longer than eight days because they send student stories ahead of time so I can critique them which I’m expecting in the mail any day now. So I didn’t want to start anything major and when I come back from Odyssey I’m only here for a couple of weeks before Launchpad, which is a NASA run workshop on Astronomy for science-fiction writers. Then it’s on to WorldCon, so I don’t want to start anything longer than a short story when I have all these things going on over the summer.

I know you’ve been involved with Clarion in the past, is this your first time teaching at Odyssey

I’ve done Clarion ten times, one or the other but this is my first Odyssey and I’m looking forward to it.

Well I hope you’ll blog about it for us.

Definitely, I’ll do my daily blogpost from up there and for Launchpad as well.

I definitely look forward to reading those and thank you so much for having this interview with us.

Thank you for having me.

-nterview conducted by Naamen Gobert Tilahun

- More blogging by Naamenblog at http://naamenblog.wordpress.com/

Previous: Gender blind, right… --- Next: Top Ten Obscure Books – 1st Round of Voting

Filed under Books & Literature, FSF, Interview, Writers & Artists, female characters, feminism, transcripts, women writers | Comments (5)