Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He now lives in Ohio. He has published stories in various magazines and anthologies. He is a Clarion graduate, Writers of The Future winner, and Campbell Award for Best New SF Writer Finalist. His work has received Honorable Mentions in the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and Year's Best Science Fiction. Chris Roberson's critically-acclaimed short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Live Without a Net (Roc, 2003), The Many Faces of Van Helsing (Ace, 2004), and the forthcoming FutureShocks (Roc, 2005), with previous and forthcoming appearances in the pages of Asimov's Science Fiction, Black October, Fantastic Metropolis, RevolutionSF, Twilight Tales, Opi8, Alien Skin, Electric Velocipede, and Lone Star Stories. His writings have received positive reviews from Locus Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Infinity Plus and RevolutionSF. He was a 2004 World Fantasy Award finalist and the winner of the 2003 Sidewise Award for Best Short Story. Questions and Answers TB: Who is Chris Roberson, really? If you mean the guy the collection agencies are looking for, I'm not him. Honest. Everyone to whom I owe large sums of money knows me by my first name (John). I'm also not a cornerback for the Jacksonville Jaguars, or a outfielder for the Philadelphia Phillies. I'm the one who is Georgia's dad, Allison's husband, and who's written a few books and stories. TB: Why write? Videogames and TV are much more fun, aren't they? Writing is a sickness. I'm sure there are some who write just because they want to do so, or write because they know they can make a few bucks doing it, but I'm not one of those. For me, writing is a compulsion I can't seem to shake. I actually get twitchy if I haven't written in too long a time--more than a couple of months and I'm completely impossible to live with, to which my wife can attest. When I was younger I actually played video games instead of writing, for a brief span, but at the end of a few months I was a miserable wreck. I actually had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity (with apologies to Jules Winnfield), and realized that I *needed* to write. I keeps me happy (more or less) and sane (same again). That I enjoy doing it, too, is just a pleasant bonus. TB: Why genre? Science fiction is my native culture. (I'm stealing this phrase from someone else, but I can't for the life of me remember who originally said it. If no one steps forward, I'll claim it as my own.) Growing up in the States in the seventies and eighties, science fiction was ubiquitous. Everything from Saturday-morning cartoons to comic books to late-night B-movies to pulp novel reprints to blockbuster summer movies--it was all science fiction, in one form or another. I resisted being a science fiction writer for years. In college, I was all set to be a post-modernist, "literary" writer. I even wrote a couple of novels in that vein, that no one will ever see. I soon realized I wasn't depressed enough for that line of work. Then, in my mercenary middle-twenties, I made a calculated decision to try my hand at writing mysteries, since that seemed to be a nicely commercial niche. I wrote a couple of mystery novels, but couldn't resist slipping outré elements into the plots, making them not perhaps outright genre, but pushing them far enough into the cross- genre grey area that mystery publishers weren't interested in them. (Paradoxically, though, they weren't genre enough to interest science fiction and fantasy publishers.) So I added them to the pile of unsold novels, and decided not to fight it any more. My brain tends to work along the lines of science fiction tropes. Whenever I run into an odd little bit of trivia, some obscure historical fact or odd scientific principle, I can't help but start thinking of ways I could use it in a story. TB: If you had to do it all over again, what would you do? This is a question that I wrestled with for some time, while writing my time travel novel, Here, There & Everywhere. I actually devised a questionnaire, touching on all sorts of time travel related topics- things like "What historical figure would you most like to meet?" and "What place and time would you most like to visit" - and included a variation of this question, and polled friends, family, and coworkers. What I discovered was that virtually everyone who singled out something in their past that they wanted to change, with the proviso that doing so might alter their present circumstances, was unhappy with who they were here and now. I'm pretty happy with who I am and where I'm at, so I have to tell you, even though huge swathes of my past were pretty damned unpleasant, I wouldn't change a thing. TB: What warps your writing the most? Depends on what you mean by "warp", I suppose. If you mean what influences my writing the most, it's probably other entertainment I take in-books, television, movies, music. I learned a long time ago that I can't help but think in pop cultural terms, and so had to accept that my writing would always reflect that. My stories are continually influenced by things I'm reading, or a documentary I just saw, or the latest episode of Deadwood or what-have-you. I used to feel a bit guilty about this, until I read the July 2005 issue of Wired Magazine, and realized that what I'm really doing, in many ways, amounts to remixing. I've been thinking about composing some sort of long exegesis on how my writing is really "Remix SF", but that verges a bit too close to some sort of movement manifesto, and I don't really have any patience for either movements or manifestos. William Gibson summed it up nicely in the Wired article, though. He refers to remixing as a process, which he called "recombinant", as opposed to an object, which art has historically been, and which he termed the "record." He cites various things which recombine extant works in new and novel ways, such as Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, fan- fiction, game-engine machinima, and mashups. Also in that issue of Wired was an interview Neil Gaiman had done with Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, the two guys behind Gorillaz, which is my favorite musical act of the moment (just ahead of Puffy AmiYumi and Ben Folds). They mentioned things like the "cross- pollination" of cultural groups, and the way in which their music and videos incorporate elements as diverse as Studio Ghibli, reggae, Latin music, Betty Boop cartoons with bad Chinese overdubs, and zombie films. Anything and everything that comes at them is fodder for the music they produce. I follow much the same process, I realized. Virtually all of my stories and novels are remixes or recombinants of one form or another. My story "O One", for example, is an item from Richard Feynman's autobiography, spliced with the folktale of John Henry and the Steam Engine, and mapped onto an alternate history flavored by Bertolucci's The Last Emperor. "Red Hands, Black Hands", which ran in Asimov's, features character who is, for all intents and purposes, the French novelist George Sand, transplanted onto a terraformed Mars dominated by Chinese culture, who ends up in a romantic entanglement with a character from a Chinese wuxia novel. But these are instances which don't rise much above the level of "easter eggs" on a DVD; there are more overt examples. My novel Here, There & Everywhere is a remix of every time travel character and trope from popular culture I grew up reading: Doctor Who, The Legion of Super-Heroes, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Time Tunnel, Voyagers, et cetera, et al. I'm particularly pleased with the blend of influences that is my forthcoming novel Paragaea: A Planetary Romance, but I don't want to give away the game, so I'll keep my mouth shut about it, for the moment. Of course, if what you mean by "warp" is what interferes most with my writing, then the answer is bees. Can't stand the things. TB: Do you have a favorite place to write? Well, for me writing falls into several distinct phases. One is, for lack of a better term, Brainstorming. This involves me with a little Moleskin notebook and a ballpoint pen, scribbling down ideas in a loose, unfocused way. I can do that anywhere, but I usually like to head to coffee shops, where I won't be distracted by email, or phone calls, or the temptation of playing with my daughter. I live in suburban Austin, though, so I don't necessarily have a corner coffee shop to habituate; luckily, the shop at the local Borders book chain has free refills on iced tea, so they tend to see a lot of me. The next phase of my writing is Outlining, where I gradually take the bits and pieces I've jotted down in my notes and work them into a functioning plot. I tend to outline to a ridiculous degree, mapping out everything to the level of paragraphs, so my outlines are usually a significant percentage of the length of the finished story. Because I'm not concentrating on the language, but just on the beats of the plot, I can do this anywhere, and usually split my time between my home office and the Borders coffee shop, working on my laptop. Finally comes the actually Writing. When I reach this point, I know what happens in virtually every paragraph of a story or chapter, but I don't know how the narrative will describe it, and I don't even necessarily have a voice and tense worked out, either. When I get to this stage, I *have* to be in my home office, the door shut and white noise pouring out of an upright air filter. The last bit of fiction I wrote anywhere else was in an empty room at my wife's old office, where my daughter and I were spending some time. I was pressing up against a deadline, and didn't have the luxury of working at home. So my wife watched the baby while I barricaded myself in this empty room, and just wrote. It was miserable. The story turned out well, but it was by far the hardest bit of writing I've done in years. I'm not in a hurry to repeat the experience! TB: What's the most challenging aspect of writing? I'm an odd duck, but for me it's probably knowing when to stop researching and tweaking an outline, and to sit down and start to write. If left to my own devices, I'd probably still be researching my first novel. I'm obsessive and, what is worse, I actually enjoy researching, and probably do much more of it than I need to do. Luckily, I'm also overly proud of the fact that I never miss a deadline, even an arbitrary one I've set for myself, and so there's some natural controls built into my process to keep me on track. TB: What's the most whacked-out thing said in a review of your work? Kirkus, in reviewing Here, There & Everwhere, referred to it as "exotic and ephemeral, like lychee-flavored bubblegum." I'm still trying to work out just what that means. TB: Okay, you're going to get marooned on an island by a bunch of angry editors, what one book do you take and why? This is going to sound completely fatuous, but it's my honest answer. If I've only got one "book" to take with me, I'd make it a big, thick notebook, completely blank, on the condition that I also have an inexhaustible supply of uni-ball Vision Elite pens (black ink, naturally). I can only read a book so many times, but there are endless possibilities with a huge sheaf of blank pages. TB: Is there a book or story you wish you could go back in time and kill the author of so you could submit their manuscript as your own? Oooh. Probably the single book I most envy is Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. I've lost count of the number of times that I've come up with an idea that I think is simply genius, only to realize that Wolfe already did it in Severian's story. Hell, if only for the bit of brilliance that was using Ascians as the name of the foreign enemy from the other side of the world, which seems like such a remarkably obvious and great notion that I'm amazed nobody had ever done it before him. Of course, I'm not too keen on the whole notion of killing Gene, though. He seems like such a nice guy. But it reminds me a conversation I had years ago about time travel paradoxes. I said that I couldn't understand why everyone who talked about paradoxes was always so hot on killing their grandfathers. Hell, I said, why do you need time travel for that? If I wanted my granddad dead that badly, I could just drive to his house and kill him right now! (Yes, I was kidding. Both about killing my grandfather, and about not understanding the paradox. What can I tell you? I was a kid, I thought it was funny.) TB: When I interview you again in 10 years, what will you hope to be talking to us about? My next book, naturally! And complaining about finding space on my shelf for all the books I've published so far. TB: What are your current plans for literary world domination? Conquering the world one reader at a time. With a smile. TB: Last, but not least, if zombies were spreading throughout the land by infectious bite what would be your 5 point response? Mmmm. Infectious bite zombies, hmmm. Tricky. So this isn't your standard "unburied dead become the shambling undead" scenario, then? Or do we have to worry about grandma when she finally kicks off from old age, as well? We all know that, in the end, the zombies are going to win, right? It's a historical inevitability, if the unburied dead start walking around and craving human flesh. And if all it takes to become a zombie is a single bite from one, your chances of remaining pure human are slim to nil. I think the best course of action would be to get scientists working on a way for zombies to retain the memories and personalities of their previous living incarnations, pronto. Zombies are effectively immortal, though they might lose a digit or jaw here and there to decomposition. The problem with becoming a zombie is that you become an unreasoning thing of pure, uncontrollable hunger. If you were instantiated in a zombie body but with your previous memories and personality intact, though, you could exert a bit more control and just dine on livestock or household pets (or the neighbors, if they annoy you). So we'd all get our memory-preservation treatments, get ourselves infected with zombie spit in a safe and controlled environment, and go on with our regular lives. Everyone knows that zombies don't eat other zombies, so we'd be safe from the mindless, unreasoning hordes who hadn't gotten the memory-preservation treatments, and we could round them up at our leisure. Maybe put them to work, if the circumstances demanded. We'd have to face, of course, the possibility that a judge, once appointed to the Supreme Court, would stay on the bench for the rest of their unlife, which would be effectively forever. But if that were the case, perhaps people would be a bit more careful with their votes come election day, so perhaps it wouldn't be a bad thing, after all. (Is that five points yet?) Relevant Links Chris Roberson's Main Listing Chris Roberson Website Tobias S. Buckell's Main Listing Tobias S. Buckell Website