Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 55

Table of Contents

The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees

by E. Lily Yu

Matchmaker

by Erin M. Hartshorn

Linguistics for the World-Builder

by Brit Mandelo

Same Story with a 21st Century Sensibility: A Conversation with John Scalzi

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Post-apolacalyptic Fisherman

Art by Georgi Markov

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2011
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees

E. Lily Yu

For longer than anyone could remember, the village of Yiwei had worn, in its orchards and under its eaves, clay-colored globes of paper that hissed and fizzed with wasps. The villagers maintained an uneasy peace with their neighbors for many years, exercising inimitable tact and circumspection. But it all ended the day a boy, digging in the riverbed, found a stone whose balance and weight pleased him. With this, he thought, he could hit a sparrow in flight. There were no sparrows to be seen, but a paper ball hung low and inviting nearby. He considered it for a moment, head cocked, then aimed and threw.

Much later, after he had been plastered and soothed, his mother scalded the fallen nest until the wasps seething in the paper were dead. In this way it was discovered that the wasp nests of Yiwei, dipped in hot water, unfurled into beautifully accurate maps of provinces near and far, inked in vegetable pigments and labeled in careful Mandarin that could be distinguished beneath a microscope.

The villagers’ subsequent incursions with bee veils and kettles of boiling water soon diminished the prosperous population to a handful. Commanded by a single stubborn foundress, the survivors folded a new nest in the shape of a paper boat, provisioned it with fallen apricots and squash blossoms, and launched themselves onto the river. Browsing cows and children fled the riverbanks as they drifted downstream, piping sea chanteys.

At last, forty miles south from where they had begun, their craft snagged on an upthrust stick and sank. Only one drowned in the evacuation, weighed down with the remains of an apricot. They reconvened upon a stump and looked about themselves.

“It’s a good place to land,” the foundress said in her sweet soprano, examining the first rough maps that the scouts brought back. There were plenty of caterpillars, oaks for ink galls, fruiting brambles, and no signs of other wasps. A colony of bees had hived in a split oak two miles away. “Once we are established we will, of course, send a delegation to collect tribute.

“We will not make the same mistakes as before. Ours is a race of explorers and scientists, cartographers and philosophers, and to rest and grow slothful is to die. Once we are established here, we will expand.”

It took two weeks to complete the nurseries with their paper mobiles, and then another month to reconstruct the Great Library and fill the pigeonholes with what the oldest cartographers could remember of their lost maps. Their comings and goings did not go unnoticed. An ambassador from the beehive arrived with an ultimatum and was promptly executed; her wings were made into stained-glass windows for the council chamber, and her stinger was returned to the hive in a paper envelope. The second ambassador came with altered attitude and a proposal to divide the bees’ kingdom evenly between the two governments, retaining pollen and water rights for the bees — ”as an acknowledgment of the preexisting claims of a free people to the natural resources of a common territory,” she hummed.

The wasps of the council were gracious and only divested the envoy of her sting. She survived just long enough to deliver her account to the hive.

The third ambassador arrived with a ball of wax on the tip of her stinger and was better received.

“You understand, we are not refugees applying for recognition of a token territorial sovereignty,” the foundress said, as attendants served them nectars in paper horns, “nor are we negotiating with you as equal states. Those were the assumptions of your late predecessors. They were mistaken.”

“I trust I will do better,” the diplomat said stiffly. She was older than the others, and the hairs of her thorax were sparse and faded.

“I do hope so.”

“Unlike them, I have complete authority to speak for the hive. You have propositions for us; that is clear enough. We are prepared to listen.”

“Oh, good.” The foundress drained her horn and took another. “Yours is an old and highly cultured society, despite the indolence of your ruler, which we understand to be a racial rather than personal proclivity. You have laws, and traditional dances, and mathematicians, and principles, which of course we do respect.”

“Your terms, please.”

She smiled. “Since there is a local population of tussah moths, which we prefer for incubation, there is no need for anything so unrepublican as slavery. If you refrain from insurrection, you may keep your self-rule. But we will take a fifth of your stores in an ordinary year, and a tenth in drought years, and one of every hundred larvae.”

“To eat?” Her antennae trembled with revulsion.

“Only if food is scarce. No, they will be raised among us and learn our ways and our arts, and then they will serve as officials and bureaucrats among you. It will be to your advantage, you see.”

The diplomat paused for a moment, looking at nothing at all. Finally she said, “A tenth, in a good year — ”

“Our terms,” the foundress said, “are not negotiable.”

The guards shifted among themselves, clinking the plates of their armor and shifting the gleaming points of their stings.

“I don’t have a choice, do I?”

“The choice is enslavement or cooperation,” the foundress said. “For your hive, I mean. You might choose something else, certainly, but they have tens of thousands to replace you with.”

The diplomat bent her head. “I am old,” she said. “I have served the hive all my life, in every fashion. My loyalty is to my hive and I will do what is best for it.”

“I am so very glad.”

“I ask you — I beg you — to wait three or four days to impose your terms. I will be dead by then, and will not see my sisters become a servile people.”

The foundress clicked her claws together. “Is the delaying of business a custom of yours? We have no such practice. You will have the honor of watching us elevate your sisters to moral and technological heights you could never imagine.”

The diplomat shivered.

“Go back to your queen, my dear. Tell them the good news.”

It was a crisis for the constitutional monarchy. A riot broke out in District 6, destroying the royal waxworks and toppling the mouse-bone monuments before it was brutally suppressed. The queen had to be calmed with large doses of jelly after she burst into tears on her ministers’ shoulders.

“Your Majesty,” said one, “it’s not a matter for your concern. Be at peace.”

“These are my children,” she said, sniffling. “You would feel for them too, were you a mother.”

“Thankfully, I am not,” the minister said briskly, “so to business.”

“War is out of the question,” another said.

“Their forces are vastly superior.”

“We outnumber them three hundred to one!”

“They are experienced fighters. Sixty of us would die for each of theirs. We might drive them away, but it would cost us most of the hive and possibly our queen — ”

The queen began weeping noisily again and had to be cleaned and comforted.

“Have we any alternatives?”

There was a small silence.

“Very well, then.”

The terms of the relationship were copied out, at the wasps’ direction, on small paper plaques embedded in propolis and wax around the hive. As paper and ink were new substances to the bees, they jostled and touched and tasted the bills until the paper fell to pieces. The wasps sent to oversee the installation did not take this kindly. Several civilians died before it was established that the bees could not read the Yiwei dialect.

Thereafter the hive’s chemists were charged with compounding pheromones complex enough to encode the terms of the treaty. These were applied to the papers, so that both species could inspect them and comprehend the relationship between the two states.

Whereas the hive before the wasp infestation had been busy but content, the bees now lived in desperation. The natural terms of their lives were cut short by the need to gather enough honey for both the hive and the wasp nest. As they traveled farther and farther afield in search of nectar, they stopped singing. They danced their findings grimly, without joy. The queen herself grew gaunt and thin from breeding replacements, and certain ministers who understood such matters began feeding royal jelly to the strongest larvae.

Meanwhile, the wasps grew sleek and strong. Cadres of scholars, cartographers, botanists, and soldiers were dispatched on the river in small floating nests caulked with beeswax and loaded with rations of honeycomb to chart the unknown lands to the south. Those who returned bore beautiful maps with towns and farms and alien populations of wasps carefully noted in blue and purple ink, and these, once studied by the foundress and her generals, were carefully filed away in the depths of the Great Library for their southern advance in the new year.

The bees adopted by the wasps were first trained to clerical tasks, but once it was determined that they could be taught to read and write, they were assigned to some of the reconnaissance missions. The brightest students, gifted at trigonometry and angles, were educated beside the cartographers themselves and proved valuable assistants. They learned not to see the thick green caterpillars led on silver chains, or the dead bees fed to the wasp brood. It was easier that way.

When the old queen died, they did not mourn.

By the sheerest of accidents, one of the bees trained as a cartographer’s assistant was an anarchist. It might have been the stresses on the hive, or it might have been luck; wherever it came from, the mutation was viable. She tucked a number of her own eggs in beeswax and wasp paper among the pigeonholes of the library and fed the larvae their milk and bread in secret. To her sons in their capped silk cradles — and they were all sons — she whispered the precepts she had developed while calculating flight paths and azimuths, that there should be no queen and no state, and that, as in the wasp nest, the males should labor and profit equally with the females. In their sleep and slow transformation they heard her teachings and instructions, and when they chewed their way out of their cells and out of the wasp nest, they made their way to the hive.

The damage to the nest was discovered, of course, but by then the anarchist was dead of old age. She had done impeccable work, her tutor sighed, looking over the filigree of her inscriptions, but the brilliant were subject to mental aberrations, were they not? He buried beneath grumblings and labors his fondness for her, which had become a grief to him and a political liability, and he never again took on any student from the hive who showed a glint of talent.

Though they had the bitter smell of the wasp nest in their hair, the anarchist’s twenty sons were permitted to wander freely through the hive, as it was assumed that they were either spies or on official business. When the new queen emerged from her chamber, they joined unnoticed the other drones in the nuptial flight. Two succeeded in mating with her. Those who failed and survived spoke afterward in hushed tones of what had been done for the sake of the ideal. Before they died they took propolis and oak-apple ink and inscribed upon the lintels of the hive, in a shorthand they had developed, the story of the first anarchist and her twenty sons.

Anarchism being a heritable trait in bees, a number of the daughters of the new queen found themselves questioning the purpose of the monarchy. Two were taken by the wasps and taught to read and write. On one of their visits to the hive they spotted the history of their forefathers, and, being excellent scholars, soon figured out the translation.

They found their sisters in the hive who were unquiet in soul and whispered to them the strange knowledge they had learned among the wasps: astronomy, military strategy, the state of the world beyond the farthest flights of the bees. Hitherto educated as dancers and architects, nurses and foragers, the bees were full of a new wonder, stranger even than the first day they flew from the hive and felt the sun on their backs.

“Govern us,” they said to the two wasp-taught anarchists, but they refused.

“A perfect society needs no rulers,” they said. “Knowledge and authority ought to be held in common. In order to imagine a new existence, we must free ourselves from the structures of both our failed government and the unjustifiable hegemony of the wasp nests. Hear what you can hear and learn what you can learn while we remain among them. But be ready.”

It was the first summer in Yiwei without the immemorial hum of the cartographer wasps. In the orchards, though their skins split with sweetness, fallen fruit lay unmolested, and children played barefoot with impunity. One of the villagers’ daughters, in her third year at an agricultural college, came home in the back of a pickup truck at the end of July. She thumped her single suitcase against the gate before opening it, to scatter the chickens, then raised the latch and swung the iron aside, and was immediately wrapped in a flying hug.

Once she disentangled herself from brother and parents and liberally distributed kisses, she listened to the news she’d missed: how the cows were dying from drinking stonecutters’ dust in the streams; how grain prices were falling everywhere, despite the drought; and how her brother, little fool that he was, had torn down a wasp nest and received a faceful of red and white lumps for it. One of the most detailed wasp’s maps had reached the capital, she was told, and a bureaucrat had arrived in a sleek black car. But because the wasps were all dead, he could report little more than a prank, a freak, or a miracle. There were no further inquiries.

Her brother produced for her inspection the brittle, boiled bodies of several wasps in a glass jar, along with one of the smaller maps. She tickled him until he surrendered his trophies, promised him a basket of peaches in return, and let herself be fed to tautness. Then, to her family’s dismay, she wrote an urgent letter to the Academy of Sciences and packed a satchel with clothes and cash. If she could find one more nest of wasps, she said, it would make their fortune and her name. But it had to be done quickly.

In the morning, before the cockerels woke and while the sky was still purple, she hopped onto her old bicycle and rode down the dusty path.

Bees do not fly at night or lie to each other, but the anarchists had learned both from the wasps. On a warm, clear evening they left the hive at last, flying west in a small tight cloud. Around them swelled the voices of summer insects, strange and disquieting. Several miles west of the old hive and the wasp nest, in a lightning-scarred elm, the anarchists had built up a small stock of stolen honey sealed in wax and paper. They rested there for the night, in cells of clean white wax, and in the morning they arose to the building of their city.

The first business of the new colony was the laying of eggs, which a number of workers set to, and provisions for winter. One egg from the old queen, brought from the hive in an anarchist’s jaws, was hatched and raised as a new mother. Uncrowned and unconcerned, she too laid mortar and wax, chewed wood to make paper, and fanned the storerooms with her wings.

The anarchists labored secretly but rapidly, drones alongside workers, because the copper taste of autumn was in the air. None had seen a winter before, but the memory of the species is subtle and long, and in their hearts, despite the summer sun, they felt an imminent darkness.

The flowers were fading in the fields. Every day the anarchists added to their coffers of warm gold and built their white walls higher. Every day the air grew a little crisper, the grass a little drier. They sang as they worked, sometimes ballads from the old hive, sometimes anthems of their own devising, and for a time they were happy. Too soon, the leaves turned flame colors and blew from the trees, and then there were no more flowers. The anarchists pressed down the lid on the last vat of honey and wondered what was coming.

Four miles away, at the first touch of cold, the wasps licked shut their paper doors and slept in a tight knot around the foundress. In both beehives, the bees huddled together, awake and watchful, warming themselves with the thrumming of their wings. The anarchists murmured comfort to each other.

“There will be more, after us. It will breed out again.”

“We are only the beginning.”

“There will be more.”

Snow fell silently outside.

The snow was ankle-deep and the river iced over when the girl from Yiwei reached up into the empty branches of an oak tree and plucked down the paper castle of a nest. The wasps within, drowsy with cold, murmured but did not stir. In their barracks the soldiers dreamed of the unexplored south and battles in strange cities, among strange peoples, and scouts dreamed of the corpses of starved and frozen deer. The cartographers dreamed of the changes that winter would work on the landscape, the diverted creeks and dead trees they would have to note down. They did not feel the burlap bag that settled around them, nor the crunch of tires on the frozen road.

She had spent weeks tramping through the countryside, questioning beekeepers and villagers’ children, peering up into trees and into hives, before she found the last wasps from Yiwei. Then she had had to wait for winter and the anesthetizing cold. But now, back in the warmth of her own room, she broke open the soft pages of the nest and pushed aside the heaps of glistening wasps until she found the foundress herself, stumbling on uncertain legs.

When it thawed, she would breed new foundresses among the village’s apricot trees. The letters she received indicated a great demand for them in the capital, particularly from army generals and the captains of scientific explorations. In years to come, the village of Yiwei would be known for its delicately inscribed maps, the legends almost too small to see, and not for its barley and oats, its velvet apricots and glassy pears.

In the spring, the old beehive awoke to find the wasps gone, like a nightmare that evaporates by day. It was difficult to believe, but when not the slightest scrap of wasp paper could be found, the whole hive sang with delight. Even the queen, who had been coached from the pupa on the details of her client state and the conditions by which she ruled, and who had felt, perhaps, more sympathy for the wasps than she should have, cleared her throat and trilled once or twice. If she did not sing so loudly or so joyously as the rest, only a few noticed, and the winter had been a hard one, anyhow.

The maps had vanished with the wasps. No more would be made. Those who had studied among the wasps began to draft memoranda and the first independent decrees of queen and council. To defend against future invasions, it was decided that a detachment of bees would fly the borders of their land and carry home reports of what they found.

It was on one of these patrols that a small hive was discovered in the fork of an elm tree. Bees lay dead and brittle around it, no identifiable queen among them. Not a trace of honey remained in the storehouse; the dark wax of its walls had been gnawed to rags. Even the brood cells had been scraped clean. But in the last intact hexagons they found, curled and capped in wax, scrawled on page after page, words of revolution. They read in silence.

Then —

“Write,” one said to the other, and she did.

About the Author

E. Lily Yu is a student at Princeton University, where she dances, makes music, keeps bees, and rarely sleeps. Her work has recently appeared in The Kenyon Review Online, Jabberwocky 5, Electric Velocipede, and Goblin Fruit, with more stories coming from Podcastle and KROnline later this year.

Matchmaker

Erin M. Hartshorn

“You’re not exactly what I expected when my mother said she’d found a shadchen.”

Miss Berazazz could’ve been Jewish, sure. The first kurz had converted only a few years after the kurz and humans had encountered each other out in space. Everyone learned of the Acceptance in Hebrew school, even if no kurz attended synagogue locally.

I stared around the pink ruffled room. Her yellow-green complexion seemed out of place. Bouquets of old-fashioned musk roses — one of the few Earth imports to do well here — were clustered everywhere, their aroma masking the natural body odors that made kurz and humans nauseated when near each other.

There had been few kurz in my classes at school; most were home-schooled. I’d wanted to be friendly toward them, but they scurried away every time they saw me coming. I’d like to have found out if the green frills circling their otherwise bare heads were as soft as they looked, if that patch of orange scales on their throats hummed to the touch when they spoke. They didn’t seem to share the same level of curiosity about my dark curls and olive skin. Pity.

Miss Berazazz winked her third eye at me. “You never met a shiksa who was a matchmaker before?”

“If there were one within five star systems, I’m sure I’d have met her.”

My mother wasn’t subtle about getting me married off. I still burned with the shame of my sixteenth-year party, when she had invited every unmarried male in the Spaceport. I don’t think I’d met even half a dozen of them before the talk turned to politics — specifically, the legality of sensor implants.

Space pilots needed the extra input for safe flying. Other spacers might, too, but our world has a strong conservative bent. We didn’t want people who could afford the best technology to have an unfair advantage in the job market. Well, any more of one than they already had.

I didn’t even get to express an opinion before tempers flared. The party became a brawl, troops were called in, and in the fracas, I was knocked into the fountain.

Mother was upset because my dress was ruined.

Five years had passed since then, and my mother was throwing everything she had into the effort of getting me married. “I don’t want you to be alone when I’m gone.” As though being alone were something to be afraid of. She had entirely too many hang-ups from that frontier planet she grew up on. Like the need to marry young. I wondered sometimes what she would have done if my father hadn’t come along, but he had and they’d married when she was just seventeen. Now she thought of me, her only child, as an old maid.

“How old are you?” Miss Berazazz’s question fit so seamlessly into my thoughts that I didn’t realize at first she’d asked it.

“Twenty-one.” I felt my ears heat up at the lie. They always blushed first, before my face. I amended my reply. “Twenty-one next week.”

Her frill rippled in agreement as though she’d expected my answer. Mother probably gave her all the dirt on me. I shifted uneasily in my seat. What had they planned together?

Miss Berazazz surprised me by standing up and leaving the room, moving backwards. “A teacher with a big heart and large ambitions. Even discounting your mother’s exaggeration, you are promising. Intelligent, caring. Come back when you are full of age. Your mother will not be party to this.”

I sat there, befuddled. Mother had sent me here; surely she was already a party to it. And if I came back this early with nothing to tell her, she would assume I’d skipped the appointment completely.

I hesitated at the door and watched the clouds scudding across the pale green sky. The school was on holiday, so I had no work there to catch up on. Maybe I could kill some time at the council chambers. Nothing like a good political debate to fill the afternoon.

Just as well none of the boys at that long-ago party had asked my opinion on the question at hand. I would have told them. Not that any juvenile’s opinions mattered. In the long run, the council bowed to pressure from the spacers and allowed implants to be used on the job. Penalties were high, though, for personal use; use outside the space support complex was cause for deportation.

Delaying my return home didn’t matter in the end. I paused to touch the mezuzah before I entered the house. Mother sat, waiting for me, back straight and stiff, on the chair in the foyer. I was to be questioned, and with the length of time I had been gone, she wouldn’t believe the truth. I told her a half-truth.

“She says I’m . . . a difficult case. She needs time to find someone suitable.”

Her eyes narrowed — enough for me to notice, but not enough to crease her perfect skin. “How much time?”

“I’m to come back at the end of next week,” I said. Next week, after my birthday. Would she see the importance of that? I didn’t see how, as I didn’t understand it myself.

“Very well. I’ll drive you there myself.”

If her only worry was that I wouldn’t go — well, that made sense. I wasn’t even sure myself why I planned to go. Certainly not legal compulsion, nor the full weight of guilt that Mother had been bearing upon me for years. Curiosity, I suppose. You don’t have to be full-legal to enter a marriage contract, not even limited dalliance or child-bearing ones. What could the shadchen have in mind?

I brought my attention back to Mother. “That’s not necessary. Really.”

“We can discuss it later.” A crease in her upper lip was the only visible sign of her displeasure. She changed the subject. “You didn’t go see her looking like that, did you?”

I glanced in the mirror over the hall table. My hair had been tossed a bit by the omnipresent wind, but otherwise I seemed presentable enough. “Why not? You chose this outfit for Ben’s swearing-in ceremony.”

My cousin Ben was on the Spaceport council. He’d barely won the election for his district, even with Mother and Aunt Nomi calling on all their friends to exert pressure on his behalf. He’d been in office a scant month now, so I was fairly confident the clothes hadn’t gone out of style just yet.

Her hands flew up. “Why do I even bother?” She addressed the ceiling, as she had so often while I was growing up. Or maybe she was talking to my father’s ghost. I’d never had the nerve to ask. She looked back at me. “That was a political occasion, in support of family. This dress is completely out of place in a business meeting where you are trying to impress someone with your future prospects. You’ll have to have something more suitable next week. Yes, perhaps a visit to ReeAnn’s shop.” She frowned. “No, ReeAnn is working on the outfits for your party.” Another pointed birthday party. Wait — outfits? Plural? “We’ll have to use Kendra this time, I suppose. It’s really too bad you don’t have a cousin your age to borrow from.”

As if that were my fault. She should take it up with Aunt Nomi who had, after all, been given a choice with Ben. Mother’s system rejected the sex selection drugs, but Aunt Nomi had an iron stomach. Personally, I was always amazed that the drugs had dared disagree with Mother. Not many things did.

Certainly Kendra didn’t. Mother was already on the line to her. I couldn’t hear Kendra’s end of the conversation, but Mother’s tone spoke volumes. A few sentences, and anyone would agree with her out of self-preservation.

My own levels of self-preservation were high enough that I never overtly disagreed with her. I simply didn’t voice opinions.

Kendra made time for Mother. We would be at her shop tomorrow morning. My measurements could be sent to her — were, in fact, on file. Kendra would use them to ensure that everything we examined would be in my size. Mother didn’t really need me there — a hologram would do as well for color, style, and bearing — but she wanted me there. As I said, no overt disagreement. There went another day of my life.

As it turned out, the day wasn’t a complete loss. Mother had a Hadassah meeting in the afternoon and had to rush off right after the fitting. If Mother wasn’t there on time, Elizabeth Holin would push through all of her own pet projects. I’d gone to a meeting once; it was amusing yet frightening to realize Mother wasn’t the only fiercely stubborn woman around. Their clashes were entertaining, but Mother expected me to back her up. I found it easier to not attend.

Mother was very understanding when I said I had other commitments. I had already agreed to become an active member when I got married, a time that evidently neared. My anticipation knew no bounds.

Mother left me at the door of Kendra’s shop. “I know you’re much too busy to accompany your poor old mother to her meetings. Don’t think anything of it.” For her, this was understanding.

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. My poor old mother played racquetball twice a week and frightened bullies in the street, and I pitied anyone who had the lapse of judgment necessary to call her “old” to her face.

“I’ll be home a little late for dinner,” she continued. “You go ahead without me and I’ll find something when I get home.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” My lines slid out with the ease of long practice. “I wouldn’t think of starting without you. You go ahead, and we’ll eat when you get home.”

After several more exchanges along the same lines, reinforced with her mention of rugelach should I need to nosh, she finally left, catching the A line toward Aunt Nomi’s house. I watched until she was out of sight before setting off in the opposite direction. I’d heard that the library had new copies of twentieth-century political speeches from Earth. I wish they had more kurzan material for comparison, but there wasn’t much demand for it.

I had always wanted to go to Earth, to study politics at one of the real universities, in Cambridge or Melbourne or Shanghai. Even I knew that it was a hopeless dream, but I still studied everything I could get my hands on. A more realistic idea would be to have the chutzpah to run for office. All I had to do first was grow a backbone, move out, and survive the guilt. Realistic — right.

When I got to the library, somebody else had already reserved the speeches, and the visuals room was occupied. I hadn’t expected that. After I joined Hadassah and began to organize charity functions of my choice, I intended to begin at the library, updating their site licenses and their tech so that more than one person could look at archived material at the same time. Very definitely tikkun olam.

The librarian tried to be helpful. “Is there something else I can get you instead?”

I tried to think of alternatives. I’d already read all their Hebrew-language archives, but not all the cultural information. Most of the material they had on the Shoah, though,  I’d need the visuals room for, so that was out.

The talk at council the previous day had been on farming and pollutants and which space company thought the Spaceport’s fees were too high now. One motion, quickly tabled, concerned some cross-breeding experiments. That might be interesting to follow; I asked for a simple genetics text. I’d look up the details of the bill later, after I got home.

The mathematics and probabilities were as dull as I expected, but the history was fascinating. The text even had a chapter devoted to the eugenics attempts under the Third Reich. I thought of my many-times-great grandmother and her release from Dachau. I already knew this history, but I read with interest about the experiments in Earth’s twenty-first century to decrease activity of monoamine oxidases as well as to increase levels of the dopamine receptor associated with risk-taking behavior. Earth wanted space pilots and people willing to brave the far reaches of space. But risk takers don’t settle down, and so entire new families of drugs were born. The drug trade ramped up. The politicians should have seen that coming.

“Seen what coming?”

I hadn’t realized I’d spoken out loud. “Excuse me — ” I looked up.

He smiled. The smile was so perfect, right down to the dimple in his left cheek, that it took me a moment to process the rest of his good looks — black hair, tan skin, grey eyes.

“Wow.” I bit my lower lip. I knew I’d said that.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt.” He put his left foot up on the table next to my chair and leaned on his knee. “I was waiting for a good moment. The librarian told me you wanted to use the visuals room.”

I nodded. Behind him, the clock on the wall showed a quarter after six. Four hours! I’d lost track of time. Mother wouldn’t have been that long at Hadassah — not since she’d given up finding leads for marrying me off, anyway. I stood up. “I have to go.”

“The room’s free now. I even asked the librarian to leave the vids keyed for you.” He pulled back but didn’t put his foot down.

“I’m sorry.” He was looking at the speeches? Gorgeous and interested in the same things I was. If only I could stay. “I didn’t realize it had gotten so late. I have to meet . . . someone.”

“Maybe I’ll see you another time, then.”

“Maybe.” He hadn’t moved, and I had to push past him to drop the genetics book at the counter. “I’m in here a lot.”

He probably hadn’t heard me and wouldn’t have cared if he had. Mother said I had my dad’s nose. I guess that could have been it, although I figured no one in his right mind would want her for a mother-in-law.

As I’d expected, Mother acted worried when I got home. “I was afraid something had happened to you.”

I walked past her to the kitchen. “Not this time,” I said. “I am hungry, though. I’ll just whip us up something, shall I?”

Mother didn’t rise to the bait. If Mother didn’t want to feed a hungry child, perhaps she really was worried.

“I expected you to be home when I arrived.”

I stopped and turned. “I’m sorry. I should have signaled you.”

Was she going to forgive me? Well, no, but she might let it go for now, to be dragged out later in one of her litanies of my failings as a daughter.

“Yes, you should have.” She walked away. Over her shoulder, she said, “Don’t eat too much. There isn’t enough time for either Kendra or ReeAnn to alter your dresses.”

No family meal, then. Fine. I grabbed a cheese sandwich and a glass of milk and curled up to think about the stranger in the library. I should have read the cross-breeding bill instead, but he was more compelling. Something about him shrieked outsider. Maybe a space captain, passing through. But then where were his implants? Ah, well, a gal could dream.

And dream I did until the morning of my twenty-first birthday. Mostly. I did eventually read the bill.

I’d assumed it would be a bill for funding at the college — some new strain of wheat with more fiber and vitamins, or livestock that would grow in a tank so we could put yet larger buildings on what was now grazing land. Scientists were always promising things like that and instead creating chickens that could lay striped eggs with yolks that glowed in the dark.

This bill was different. It claimed to be “to protect the purity of the human and kurz races.” In an attachment — not part of the bill itself but clearly meant to influence its passage — one of the sponsors told a story of his father, whose genetic material had been stolen and used to impregnate a kurz female.

The bill had lots of language in it about the protection of the two species and about how cross-breeds could serve as vectors for illnesses to spread from one to the other.

It was a marvel of statesmanship. It had to be, to allow every artificial method of procreation, every drug, every choice we’d given ourselves about our children, yet disallow any hybrids. It stopped short of barring kurz procreation on a planet where there were humans, but not by much. The hints were there for anyone who’d studied politics and history. This was just the beginning.

It stank worse than a roomful of kurz after a softball game.

I still hadn’t decided what I could do about it. Ben was too busy to talk to me, although I left several messages at his office.

Today, though, I wouldn’t worry about it. Today was the day I went back to see the shadchen, the day I accepted Mother’s wish to find me a husband. I really didn’t care. I had a job; I had ambitions. I even had a cause. I didn’t need a husband. It was my mother who wouldn’t give up.

Before getting dressed, I paused to look at the yellow star hanging on my wall. The faded ancient fabric was framed behind glass in a controlled atmosphere that prevented further deterioration. I stroked the wooden frame. Had that distant ancestor married for love, or had she, too, been to a matchmaker? I knew she hadn’t met her husband until after the war. I wondered what her dreams had been. They hadn’t been passed down from mother to daughter as the star had been.

“I remember,” I whispered.

I pulled out the dress and overskirt that ReeAnn had insisted would be perfect for meeting my future husband. I felt like an idiot with the skirts swishing and swirling as I walked. It was the price I’d had to pay to go alone.

That wasn’t the way these things were done. The shadchen should have met me to size me up for herself. Then Mother would take over, whether I was difficult or not. Mother should meet with Miss Berazazz and my future husband and mother-in-law to work out the details. Only when the contract was sealed would I set eyes on him. There were several arguments I could have made; I used the simplest.

“The shadchen said we should do it this way.”

That was that. Not even Mother would offend a matchmaker willing to take my unruly self in tow. And so she sat once more in the uncomfortable chair by the front door and waited for me to come down the stairs in my new finery, waited to say good-bye to her grown-up daughter who would finally get married, waited to take one last stab at my self-esteem.

She stood as I approached the landing. “You’ll do, I suppose, but would it have killed you to do something with your hair?”

And there it was. I touched my hair self-consciously. “Short of cutting it all off, this was the best I could do.” I paused in front of the mirror and pulled my hair off my face. “I could try that. Might start a new trend.”

“Your father must be spinning in his grave to hear you talk like that.” She pushed me at the door. “Go on, then. Try to remember to be a lady.”

As if I could forget in this get-up. I thought about turning back, but ladies do not renege on their word, even if they didn’t like their options. I didn’t even know my options. Miss Berazazz might have already chosen someone, someone I couldn’t stand. I quailed. The only thing that pushed me forward was the thought of telling Mother I didn’t go.

I pushed the door open.

A kurz looked up from an armchair. His eyes were the same deep green as the edge of his frill. “Yes?” he asked.

“I’m sorry.” I tried to back out of the room while still talking, but my overskirt snagged on the door. I tugged at it without looking. “I didn’t realize someone else was . . . I was looking for . . . I’ll come back later.”

His frill rose in mild surprise. “Do you think you should do that?”

“Come back? Yes, I’m expected.”

“No, not that. I meant — ”

My overskirt tore. I stopped pulling, but it was too late. A large piece of fabric remained caught on the bottom of the door, and the skirt itself was beyond repair. I felt my ears growing hot with embarrassment and knelt to pry the fabric loose, letting my hair fall forward to mask my face.

“Here, let me help you with that.”

I inhaled to argue and stopped in surprise. “You don’t smell.”

His frill rippled. “I beg your pardon?”

My face should have been in flames based on the heat I was feeling. “You — I — kurz always — I’ll shut up now.”

“Not on my account, I trust.”

I was spared from answering because Miss Berazazz entered from the back room at that moment. Her frill rippled when she saw the two of us together at the door.

“I see you’ve met my son.”

I learned a lot in the next few minutes.

Kurz mating habits are reasonably close to human, although they’re compulsively monogamous. Miss Berazazz had chosen the courtesy title “Miss” based solely on how it sounded to her. She was married, he was off-planet, and Chur-kil was their only child.

“Which brings us to you.” Miss Berazazz finished spieling off history. “You need a husband. My son needs a wife.”

I gaped at her. Our species weren’t even from the same solar system. I had more in common biologically with chimpanzees than I did with any kurz. Then there was that bill before the council. “But — we’re incompatible.”

“I don’t know. I thought we were getting along pretty well.” He had the nerve to wink his right eye at me, and I blushed again.

“Perhaps not so incompatible as all that. Chur-kil is the first generation of . . . an experiment.” I stared in horrified fascination as she triggered a holo on her desk. It could have been the older brother of the man I’d met in the library, identical except for blue eyes, streaks of gray above his ears, and a ridge of sensor implants under each eyebrow. “His father.”

“That’s not possible,” I said. But I remembered the stolen genetic material mentioned in the bill. I bit my lower lip. “Do you have documents?”

I blanched. Mother would’ve found the rudeness unforgivable, but Miss Berazazz didn’t even wave her frill.

“Certainly.” She used her monitor to call up copies of her marriage certificate and Chur-kil’s birth certificate. They could have been faked, but since I could access the information from the central database, there wasn’t much point.

I leaned back in my chair. “And he’s the actual father?”

“We’ll give you the medical records later, but right now, hear me out. As I said, my son is the first generation. We want a second generation, one that will be able to breed freely with either parent race. That’s where you come in.”

This was why I had to be twenty-one. Mother would never have listened to this. It wasn’t illegal; no one thought it possible. But Mother, a blessing on her head, had always wanted me to marry —

“I don’t suppose you’re Jewish? Or a doctor?”

Was I really considering this? So I’d never see Earth. That had never been realistic.

Chur’s frill was ruffling again. I watched, confused.

“Neither, I’m afraid. I’d be willing to convert, but I’m afraid a bris is out of the question.”

My mouth opened. Pause. Think about what you’re going to say. “I’m afraid the rabbi would insist.”

Miss Berazazz — his mother — cut across our interchange. “Did you pay no attention to comparative anatomy in school?”

I shrugged. “I learned science from test to test.”

“Kurshall keep us all safe!” She leaned across the table. “Physically, you may be compatible enough to join, but there is no foreskin.”

“So your entire race is circumcised. Even better.”

This couldn’t be real. I didn’t joke about such things. Mother would be appalled to hear me even discussing them.

“More or less.” His brow creased, and the corners of his mouth turned up. It didn’t come naturally to him, but he was trying to smile. I found it charming, even if he had been practicing long before he’d heard my name.

“What exactly do you want me to do?”

The marriage license was already made out. The ceremony could take place immediately. Accompany Miss Berazazz to a clinic the following day, and by the time my party rolled around, I should be well on my way to being knocked up. We could try for future children the old-fashioned way. Only one thing hadn’t been taken care of.

“I didn’t know where you’d want to live.” He touched the back of my hand with a single finger.

I pulled my hand away, leaned back in my chair, and rubbed my temples. What would Mother say about a kurz for a son-in-law?

I went back to something tangible. “I met someone the other day who looks like your father.”

They exchanged looks. Miss Berazazz said, “My husband had a child from his first marriage. Chur-kil’s brother . . . never accepted his father’s remarriage. He may be here to cause trouble.”

That perfect smile, those grey eyes. I looked at Chur-kil. His frill was flat against his head. I didn’t want to be superficial. I didn’t. And yet . . .

I opened my mouth to refuse.

“Life won’t be easy for our children,” he said. “But with time, more time than we’ll see, our peoples will truly be one.”

The wistfulness in his voice struck a chord in me. They had a glorious vision. I came from a people proud to be set apart, a people he was willing to join. But he’d been planning this for a long time; I hadn’t. I wouldn’t rush into anything. I told myself it had nothing to do with his brother’s dimple, and I almost believed it.

I pushed my chair back from the table. “I need time.”

“Of course.” Chur looked disappointed but nodded.

His mother was less understanding. I’m used to dealing with mothers, though, and she was a pushover compared to even Aunt Nomi. I promised to return in a week with a decision.

Chur walked me to the door. “I’m sorry about your skirt.”

Tell him it had been bought for the occasion? No. “It wasn’t my favorite.”

Time to go home and re-read the bill. Marriage would be making a stand, but it had to mean more than that, more than green eyes and a forced smile. I had to think. First, though, I had to decide what to tell Mother.

I couldn’t — didn’t — tell her all the truth. Fortunately, when I walked in with a torn skirt, Mother’s attention was all for that. “How could you? It wouldn’t have been suitable for your party, certainly, but it could have been part of your trousseau.”

Just like that we were on the subject of my marriage.

“Perhaps.” I twitched my skirt and moved past her to the stairs.

Her voice stopped me. “Young lady.”

I’d had the entire trip home to think about what to say. Except I was thinking about the marriage proposal, legal threats, in-laws who smelled, and talking to my rabbi. Chur had been . . . nice. A vague word, but it fit. He was pleasant and witty, completely agreeable.

And he’d winked at me. No man had ever winked at me, except for Uncle David when I was a little girl. Chur didn’t care about my dad’s nose, about what I looked like — so far as I knew, all he did care about was that I was unmarried and twenty-one.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

I sighed. “He was friendly, but I’m afraid his mother will try to run our lives. I asked for some time to think about it.”

“I see.” The infinitesimal eyebrow lift. “Is he at least Jewish?”

“He says he’ll convert.” I kissed her cheek. “But I do need time. You wouldn’t want us to name our first-born child for someone on his side of the family, would you?”

With that, I breezed past her and up the stairs. Everything I’d said was true. I’d only left out the fact that he was kurz. Not fully by biological standards, but to all appearances. I wasn’t looking forward to that conversation.

I worried at the decision that day and the next and the day of my party — even as I prepared to greet my guests, I wondered what they would say if Chur stood next to me.

A surprise guest showed up at my party — the handsome stranger from the library — Chur-kil’s half-brother. I first spotted him with Ben and a couple of Ben’s cronies from the Spaceport council. I wanted to talk to them — Ben still hadn’t returned my calls — but hostess duty compelled me to chat with women who wouldn’t have been near my party if they had dared offend Mother.

“I hear you went to a shadchen.” I couldn’t remember her name. Some vacuous person a couple years older than me, probably with two boys and two girls by now.

“Mother’s idea.” Why elaborate?

Uncle David joined the conversation. “Historically, matchmakers create more lasting unions than personal choice does.”

“Historically,” I replied, “there wasn’t usually a way to dissolve a marriage short of murder.”

“Interesting. Are you looking to hire somebody for the job?” It was the stranger. Ben stood next to him.

“I’m not married yet, so I’m afraid it would be premature. I can take your references to keep on file.”

“Alas, I have none.” His smile was as charming as I remembered.

“Do you at least have a name?”

“My apologies,” he said at the same time Ben said, “I brought him over to introduce.”

“The least you could do if you helped him crash my party,” I said.

Ben gave me his standard exasperated cousin look. “May I introduce Joe Yee? Joe’s recently arrived at the port and is crazy enough to want to make it permanent.”

“The lure of the unknown,” Joe said. “As well as the fascinating beauties on your planet.”

Ben coughed. I ignored him, even though I didn’t blame him. I tried to keep the frown off my face. I was certain Joe was here to cause trouble for Miss Berazazz and Chur, but what in the world was he doing at my party?

“What would you do here?” I asked.

“Oh, no. You’re going to set each other off,” Ben said.

“I was thinking of going into politics,” Joe said.

“I suppose you lapped up all that arguing about the different spacer companies the other day.”

He shrugged. “I’ve heard it all from the other side. What do you think of the recently tabled motion on cross-breeding?”

Was he actually going to announce his views? I said, “I’m no biologist. What about you?”

He spread his hands. “I’m afraid I haven’t studied enough of the particulars to have an opinion yet.”

Uncle David snorted. “He’s a politician, all right.”

“A pity,” I said. “Perhaps you can explain it to me after you’ve had time to study it.”

“I’d be delighted.”

Later, I managed to get Ben off by himself, but only after promising I wouldn’t talk to him about any of the bills facing the council. I asked him about Joe. “I could swear I’ve seen a picture of his father.”

A shrug. “It’s possible. His father’s a captain on an interplanetary run. The news often has pictures of one or another of them — usually when something bad happens.”

Morbid curiosity and gossip. That just about sums up news. I’m not above it myself, but Ben didn’t know about any other family Joe might have. “I thought you had an engagement just about ready to announce.”

“Nothing’s final.”

Mother found us talking then and chased us back to the party. I wasn’t being a responsible hostess, and it might not be too late to catch the eye of the Governor’s younger son. As said son had a wandering eye and hands to match, I wasn’t as enthusiastic about the prospect as Mother was. I followed her across the patio toward him anyway.

Help arrived from an unexpected source. Joe caught my arm. “You promised me a dance.”

Mother, never one to complain about a gift to the giver’s face (unless you were family, and then it wasn’t so much a complaint as a megillah of what the money could have been better spent on), pushed me into his arms and glided off to speak to Aunt Nomi.

The song was half over, but I went through the motions. Dancing doesn’t thrill me, although the feel of his hand on mine did strange things to my heartbeat. When the music changed, Joe would have kept dancing.

I drew him to a nearby bench. “I thought only elected officials refused to give an opinion.”

“I don’t want to say anything I might regret later,” he said. “People would expect me to live up to it.”

“You haven’t been involved in politics before, have you?”

“So young to be such a cynic.” He brushed his lips across my hand while looking into my eyes. It was a romantic gesture, even if I did see the flash of a sensor implant on his upper lip. He wouldn’t be using it away from the transport sector, not with the penalties. The texture implied simulskin on the surface, and most girls probably never noticed it was there. I wondered what he was wired for.

I left my hand in his. I looked at the hands, not ready to meet his gaze.

“Perhaps you’ll make a true believer of me yet,” I murmured.

He leaned in close. “But a believer in what?”

My eyes widened at his tone, and I looked up. His eyes were narrowed, and the charming smile was gone. His grip on my hand tightened.

His voice low, he said, “Do you know what you’ve gotten yourself into?”

The music changed again. People moved past us to the dance area. I pulled at my hand, but he didn’t let go.

“What are you talking about?”

“The kurz. Don’t deny it. Their pheromones cling to you like sewer water.”

The sensor must be good to pick it up after two days.

I shrugged. “Mother sent me to a shadchen. I was surprised to find she’s not human, but if she finds me a husband, it clearly doesn’t matter to Mother.”

“If you’re not telling me the truth, I will find out.” His sneer marred his good looks. “I know of their plans to pollute the human race with their filth. I’ll stop this — ”

I couldn’t prove he’d used the implant. And if I accused him, it would just give him one more opportunity to air his bigotry when he got his day in court. Distasteful as he was, I had to get him out of here without that satisfaction.

It was time to be outraged. I’d spent years watching Mother do it; time to see if the passive lessons paid off. My voice rose just enough to cut across the nearby din. “Is that why you came here uninvited? There are standards of behavior in this community.” I snatched my hand back with great force.

A few heads turned, but Joe couldn’t see them from where he was. He said, “Don’t flatter yourself. I’m checking all the unmarried local women.”

“My, a libertine or desperate. Perhaps both.” I knew that wasn’t what he meant, but the onlookers didn’t. I stood. “I’ll thank you to leave now.”

He looked as though he wanted to say something else. Then he saw Mother standing next to him. To his credit, he didn’t blanch.

“I believe my daughter asked you to leave.” Nothing colored her voice. “My nephew will be happy to show you the way out.”

Ben didn’t look happy. Joe had come with him, and he was going to get an earful from both Mother and Aunt Nomi later. He put his hand on Joe’s shoulder as if he’d ejected men from parties before. Maybe he had; Ben went to parties where that sort of thing might happen.

The incident effectively killed the party. Clusters of people stood about, talking quietly and casting furtive glances at me when they thought I wasn’t looking. Look at the freak who chased off the only eligible man to show any interest in her ever. If it hadn’t been my party, I’d have pled a headache and left, but a hostess has responsibilities — as though Mother would let me forget.

I was duly grateful as my guests began leaving in twos and threes. Many of them still wouldn’t meet my eyes. Mother stood beside me, smiling and chatting. I was doomed as soon as the last guest left. I knew it.

The door closed.

I pursed my lips and looked at the nearby chair. “Does that leg look chipped to you?”

The ruse was pointless. She looked over swiftly, then returned her gaze to me. “It’s fine. You, however, have some explaining to do.”

“I didn’t mean to make a scene, but he was being rude — ” inspiration struck “ — and crude about my visits to Miss Berazazz.”

Rudeness one should rise above. Crudeness, on the other hand, was just not done.

Her left shoulder seam pleated a trifle; she had relaxed. I wasn’t clear of port yet, though. “You know what I think of you bringing up such matters to strangers.”

That one I was prepared for. “Talk circulates at a party, Mother. You know that. I’ll talk to Ben about his choice of companions.”

“You needn’t bother, child. I will — ”

“I was hostess. It’s my responsibility.” I hadn’t interrupted Mother since I was two years old. My neck prickled, and I could taste acid in my throat. I bit the inside of my lip. I wouldn’t get sick now.

Finally, she nodded. “I might still have a word with Nomi about how she’s raised her son, but as you say, it is your responsibility.”

I don’t remember going upstairs to my room. Shock will do that. I had to get Ben on the line. Not yet, though. I wasn’t sure he’d be home. Maybe Ben would be willing to arrange Joe’s quiet deportation for illegal use of implants if I protected Ben from our mothers. It was worth a try. No need to tell him I’d already saved him from mine.

Joe had spoken of polluting the human race. I’d heard that line of rhetoric before.

I crossed my room to face the faded cloth star and ran my finger over the glass as though I could touch the fabric. “Never again.”

Chur was more human to me than Joe would ever be. He’d make a good husband. I made a call. “I think you should talk to my rabbi. I’ll let him know you’re coming.”

About the Author

Erin M. Hartshorn is a desert rat transplanted to a humid climate. Her ideal home has bookcases in every room. She is a moderator at Forward Motion for Writers, an on-line writers community. Her fiction has appeared both on-line and in print in various places, placed in the PARSEC short story contest, earned honorable mentions in the Writers of the Future contest, and been short-listed for the UPC Award. When she’s not writing, she enjoys various handicrafts, though she prefers spending time with her family.

Linguistics for the World-Builder

Brit Mandelo

Constructing a believable, habitable universe is one of the first things a writer of speculative fiction has to tackle — the idea of the world, its shapes and peoples, is a necessary thing to telling any story, but it’s especially tricky when you’re playing with reality. Both SF and fantasy have to address the problem of suspending disbelief for the reader and immersing them in a world, whether it’s similar to their own or radically different. Writers pay attention to their physical setting much of the time, describing sensible objects like terrain, smells, plants, animals, weather. They build a panorama view of their world for the reader.

Problems arise, however, in believably populating this real-seeming place with real-seeming people. What makes a person real, or a society? There are obvious questions to be answered — their belief systems, their biases (sexual, racial, economic, there will be at least a few), their relationships; variety within those among an appropriately varied population. There is also the question of language, the complex phenomena of human communication. An understanding of language and its science, linguistics, is invaluable to a world-builder. It changes one’s entire way of looking at how people really speak.

Linguistics is a multi-faceted and theoretically dense science, one worth dedicated study, but for the curious writer there are several immediately useful, fun concepts in socio- and psycholinguistics that can be used to add interest and complexity to fiction. Psycholinguistics deals with the relationship between language and cognition, words and thought, whereas sociolinguistics deals with how people use language in society. A crash course on some linguistic theories might give the writer a whole new box of tools for world-building, with the caveat that great world-building is no replacement for telling a good story; it just helps.

Variation and Codes

Within one language, there will probably exist several codes (a neutral term indicating any kind of system two or more people use for communication). These can include dialect, vernacular, standard language and also socially reinforced codes. Language is not so simple as “English” or “Spanish,” or even “Elvish.” Speakers who feel that they only have one language will still have multiple codes, though they themselves may not be aware of it.

Writers often employ such distinctions by giving a character an obvious dialect; using dropped syllables or phonetic slurrings like “gonna” or “aintcha.” The problem with this is that it’s an overly simplistic way of presenting dialect, used to denote the “otherness” of a given character. A better example of dialect as it actually functions in real life is that of Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, which pays close attention to the less obvious but more intrinsic aspects of a real dialect: grammatical and lexical changes.

“Is what do you, child?”

“Oh God, Mami, Tony gone, I ain’t know where, and I black out again, and when I wake up, it had Crack and Jay and Crapaud lying on the ground, and the rose dead, and Crapaud… Crapaud… Mami, everything go wrong.”

Dialect is not just dropping a letter here and there — it’s about word-order, pronoun use, and any number of other grammatical differences.

Dialect is also not set in stone: while it may be a character’s comfortable/personal speech, they also possess other codes. Those codes could be used in social situations when the speaker is addressing someone of a higher status or more official position than themselves, called respect varieties. They could be religious or ethnic codes used only in the shared speech community; or the “genderlect,” a much-argued speech variation that some linguists have claimed to detect when people of one gender are isolated in groups together. So, while your character may speak “southern” dialect in a group of friends, in front of their boss or in a court of law they will assuredly attempt the standard language variety instead of using their comfortable dialect. They may not succeed, but they will try — social pressure sees to that. Language is a social device, and as such, it is nearly impossible to separate it from its social dimensions.

All of these varieties can be grouped also into what linguist Basil Bernstein described as elaborate and restricted codes. The elaborate code is a language variety with a wider range of lexical items (words) available in it, which can communicate complex ideas between speakers unfamiliar with each other. The restricted code is one that functions in the opposite way; it lacks lexical variety and cannot be used to express the same wide range of ideas. The restricted code is often used with tight-knit groups: between partners, friends, in religious groups, in militaries, et cetera. There is also a level of class definition with elaborate and restricted codes: every person speaks a restricted code, but not every person will have the opportunity or available education to learn the elaborate code. Thus, dialect is often a restricted code, while the standard language variety is an elaborate code.

When writing dialogue, codes should be in the forefront of the writer’s mind: which characters speak which codes, and when, and with whom? They shouldn’t always speak in exactly the same way. If the language is a construction of the writer’s own devising or the book is not contemporary, they must either research or devise the codes for themselves. A character who is mono-lingual doesn’t only speak one way. Including codes lends dialogue an authenticity that it will otherwise lack. The reader might not be consciously aware of the speech constructions, but they hear them every day in their own language. The reality will seem smoother.

Multi-Lingual Societies

It is not uncommon for a community/society (due to colonialism, shared borders, shared religion, or any number of factors) to be multilingual. However, being multilingual isn’t just about speaking two or more languages as mother-tongues. As with other types of codes, the social variations and pressures that accompany multilingual societies are a driving factor in speech and usage.

If the created world demands a multilingual society, there are many possible ways for this to manifest, and each has different implications for the way people speak. Like other codes, which language is spoken is a matter of domain: it is interactive, depending on who the speaker is speaking to and in what situation. The lines are often blurry in these domains, resulting in a multilingual phenomena called code-switching. This is when, in the course of a single conversation or even sentence, the multilingual speaker flips without acknowledgement (often without noticing it themselves) between their languages. An excellent example of this in textual action is Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, where Chinese and English flow into and around each other in the character’s speech.

“We each and each respect, dui budui?”

“Dui,” I say. Right.

“Here, you tech engineer, job so-so.”

“Bu-cuo,” I answer. Not bad.

“I have daughter,” Foreman Qian says. “Request you to my home come, meet her, hao buhao?”

This is, obviously, a difficult trick to manage in a narrative context where the reader may not understand both of the languages the writer wants to use.

Another option available to the world-builder is the stricter phenomenon of diglossia, which occurs in a stable language environment where, in addition to the usual dialects, there is also a highly codified split between two language-varieties. One is the High variety, used in education, official documents and often supported by a wealth of literature or historical respect. It is not generally a conversational or commonly spoken language. That role is filled by a Low variety, often the language of the working class and split off from the literary and historical traditions of the country. For example, in Switzerland the High variety is Standard German, taught in schools and codified in textbooks (more an elaborate code) and the Low variety is Swiss German, a local language variation that is not fully intelligible to a speaker of only Standard German. This is a complex situation to try and use in a fictional setting, but it does occur in reality.

A third multilingual possibility is that of pidgin or creole language developments that occur in overlapping trade societies or in colonial situations. A pidgin is a restricted code made up of mutually intelligible words and used between speakers of two separate languages who come into common, and sometimes forced, contact. Refugees, victims of colonization, and similar peoples often use a pidgin language. It is not technically a functional language and often contains only lexical items while lacking a working grammar. A creole occurs when the pidgin language begins to deepen and develop through continued exposure, until there are mother-tongue speakers of a hybrid language created from both parent languages. These mixed languages, especially in worlds where perhaps an alien and human civilization are trading, or where one has invaded the other, can be especially illustrative of social developments and character interactions. The pidgin can be used to show language barriers, trouble with communication on a greater scale, while the creole possibility illustrates the combination of two societies into something new.

The Words Themselves

Though the overarching shapes and patterns in a language are important for authenticity, the word-by-word level is equally important. It’s commonly known that languages seem to reflect their surroundings but the reasons why are fascinatingly layered.

One classic psycholinguistic theory dealing with that interrelation is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It’s been expanded and adapted in recent years to include further evidence and is no longer used in its original form. The basic supposition of the hypothesis is that differences in ways of thinking of things are due to the language itself. Thus thinking of “slush,” “snow,” “sleet,” and “flurries” as either different or the same is a consequence of the words available to us in our language system. However, this does not mean that language restricts thinking; that part of the hypothesis has been roundly discarded. There is also the question of what came first — does a plains-dwelling people develop a language with only one word for hill because there are no mountains, or do they consider all mounds, hills and mountains to be “hills” because of the language they grew up with?

There must have been a point when, as a language split off from its root due to geographical or other changes, words began to either die off or grow anew to reflect the new surroundings. For those generations, as the language slowly changed, the words were changing to reflect the surroundings. Some words weren’t needed any longer, and there were some things that had a need for a new word. Kerry Tynan Fraser contributed an article on this phenomenon to the February issue of Clarkesworld, “Neologism and Linguicide.” Some of the ideas on language change it posits are found more in pop-science than in current linguistic theories. There are patterns in how new words are created which remain similar in all code-systems. Fraser’s article relies on Bill Bryson’s theories, but for further reader reference William McGregor’s Linguistics: An Introduction offers a more common pattern-system, one which is currently taught to students of linguistics. For a writer building a fresh society, the language-evolution part of the process can be integral. What words grow out of the new situation? Which words fall out of usage or become combined with other words?

Further generations after an initial change language can, theoretically, affect the way the mother-tongue speakers see the world around them. Take time words, for example. In societies without words for linear time or grammatical markers for tenses, the social concept of time is often cyclical. There are no words to explain linear time processing. Often there is no way to tell what came first. Did the language, as it grew from its original root, drop linear time words to reflect the philosophy of the people? Or, alternately, are the people unable to express linear time because the language they learned did not have the words for it to begin with? There’s generally no way to tell for real-life languages, but a writer can play with this knowledge in the world-building. Maybe a new human society lives on a space station for generations and begins losing words for physical characteristics of Earth, like weeds or puddles. Or, maybe a person raised in this society has never known those things and has no words for them, so they would not think “that’s a weed” if they saw one. They might simply think “plant” or “grass.”

One remarkable example of an adaptation of Sapir-Whorf comes from later work on “thinking for speaking” by Stephen Levinson and John Haviland, which examines the use of spatial terms. In their study, it was found that for speakers of a language that used compass-point directions (north, south, east, west) versus speakers of a language that use body-oriented direction (left, right), their thought processes regarding spatial relations differed. If asked to pick up items off one table, turn around, and reorient them on a table that was previously behind them, they would organize the items differently. The compass-direction speakers oriented their items according to north-south-west-east. The body-oriented direction speakers flipped the objects to mirror the way they were facing on the other table, putting the same objects to their personal right and left — which is different from the compass directions. This isn’t a conscious action on their part. It shows that the way they learned language, and what words their language offers them, actually affected their perception. The possibilities for using this in fiction are fantastical. In a space-faring society, how would a person orient their directions? Likely by the way their language did so — but how will the writer choose to arrange that language? It’s all world-building, and with each word the writer chooses they can change the whole cognitive arrangement of their character, if they choose to apply some linguistic science in their planning.

The authenticity of any world a writer might create derives from the language they create it with. Books are made of words, after all; they rely on language uniquely. They offer no body language to assist the reader. If the words are right, and the patterns are universal, recognizable even subconsciously, then the writer will succeed in convincing the reader. Attention to language is the only way to do it effectively.

For each of these theories that intrigues, be assured that there are ten more equally engaging that aren’t represented here — for example, the much-argued idea of language “death.” Another topic that might be of value to the curious is language acquisition — how people learn language — which has both biological and social aspects. It is a fascinating topic that strikes at the heart of what allows us to communicate at all, and examines the consequences of isolation, abuse and childhood development in relation to language.

Linguistics is the science of language, much like story-telling is the art of language. They go hand in hand.

Bibliography

Bernstein, Basil. “Elaborate and Restricted Codes: Their Social Origins and Some Consequences.” American Anthropologist 66 (1964): 55-69.

Hopkinson, Nalo. Brown Girl in the Ring. New York: Aspect, 1998.

McGregor, William. Linguistics: An Introduction. New York: Continuum, 2009.

McHugh, Maureen F. China Mountain Zhang. New York: Tor, 1992.

Wardhaugh, Ronald. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 4th edition. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002.

About the Author

Brit Mandelo is a writer and occasional critic. Her primary fields of interest are speculative fiction and queer literature, especially when the two coincide. Also, comics. Her fiction has recently appeared at Tor.com (”Though Smoke Shall Hide the Sun”). She is a Louisville native and lives there with her partner in an apartment that doesn’t have room for all the books.

Same Story with a 21st Century Sensibility: A Conversation with John Scalzi

Jeremy L. C. Jones

In the opening scene of Fuzzy Nation, a dog named Carl steps on a detonator panel and sets off more than just the plot. The novel, as Scalzi says, is a “reimagining of the story and events in Little Fuzzy, the 1962 Hugo-nominated novel by H. Beam Piper.” Scalzi borrows the story arc, character names, and other plot elements and re-tells the story with, as he explains below, a “Twenty-first century sensibility.”

Furthermore, Fuzzy Nation is an example of what happens when an established writer takes creative risks — and has a lot of fun doing it. The novel is saturated with respect for Piper, affection for the source material, and an intellectual playfulness. It is charming without being trite; thought-provoking without being didactic.

Scalzi is the author of four The Old Man’s War Novels and the standalones Agent to the Stars and The Android’s Dream. His shorter fictional works include How I Proposed to My Wife: an Alien Sex and Judge Sn Goes Golfing. Scalzi has also written a variety of non-fiction books on topics such as money, the universe, and science fiction movies. The 2008 collection Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: Selected Writing, 1998 — 2008 goes a long way toward mapping Scalzi’s sharp-witted web presence.

I spoke with Scalzi last month, a few hours after he’d finished a new novel. He was still zinging and buzzing with the thrill of it. Below, we talk about Little Fuzzy and Fuzzy Nation, the writing process and a straight man named Carl.

Where did Fuzzy Nation start? At what point did you say, “I’ve got to do this”?

I was between projects. I’d had a project fall through and I had some free time. And I was thinking, “Well, now what do I want to do now that I don’t have this big project anymore?” I had often thought about taking a book that existed before and seeing what it would be like to play with it a little.

I’d been thinking of Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper for a number of reasons. One because it was a really good book. It was one I enjoyed very much when I was growing up. It was one of my favorite science fiction books and I really admired Piper’s style and his way of telling a story. In some ways, and this is true with a lot of the science fiction of the 50s and 60s, the future that Piper wrote has sort of become our “past”. In some ways some ways there are little things about the book and the way its structured that seem anachronistic now. You’d read it and go, “Well, this was somebody’s future, but not our future anymore.” If you read the opening of Little Fuzzy, it has Jack Holloway there sucking on a pipe and pulling on his mustache and basically looking very much like 1950s or 60s man of the world. It’s a good story and it’s a lot of fun. There’s nothing wrong with the original. You take it for what it was, but wouldn’t it be kind of interesting to take that basic story and look at it again with a 21st century sensibility? How would it be different? How would you make the characters different? How would you do the story differently? Would it end up being the same story, would it unfold the same way, or would there be things that were different? This is something I thought about for years and years and years. So when I had that project fall through I just thought, “You know what? Why don’t I do this and see what it’s like?”

When I started writing I didn’t have a plan to do anything with it. When you do something like this, you are messing with somebody’s work. And when you do that the general rule of thumb is you don’t do anything with it afterwards, because, generally speaking, people get upset when you do that. But in this particular case there were two things that worked to my advantage. Piper had passed on so he would not be hugely outraged. His fans might be, but not Piper himself. The other thing is, in this particular case Little Fuzzy, the novel itself, is in the public domain. So even if people were outraged, it would still be morally and legally okay to play with it.

So I went ahead and did it. And I had a fantastic time writing it. It was really nice to be able to do something that was… fun to do. It was really enjoyable. It was fun to play with the story and to basically have no pressure on it. I wasn’t planning to sell it; wasn’t planning to do anything with it. I was just doing it for the intellectual exercise of it.

When I was done, I called up my agent and said, “You know how I was supposed to be working on an actual novel that you could sell, right? Well, I haven’t been doing that.” And I explained this weird project to him. I said, “I re-wrote this book that is in the public domain. And I will show it to you but I don’t think you can do anything with it. But I want you to see what I’ve been doing.” So he says, “All right, fine, send it along.”

So I sent it to him and I didn’t really think about it much. I was thinking about what I was going to write next. And then he sends me an e-mail and he says, “I think I can do something with this. Do you mind if I try?” “Sure, go right ahead.” Because why the hell not, right?

The Piper Estate had been sold to Ace Books back in the 1980s or something like that and is now owned by Penguin. My agent went to Penguin and said, “Look, we have this book that is based on H. Beam Piper. We know that you have the rights for Little Fuzzy. We want to publish [Fuzzy Nation]. What do we need to do to get your permission to do that? Thus began a months long process of negotiations with the rights holders so that we could get it completely cleared away.

At the end of the day they gave us permission. And so this project I had basically written just for the fun of it and for sort of getting into the habit of actually enjoying writing science fiction again turned out to be something I was actually able to sell.

Your affection for the source material really shines through, and so does the playfulness. It seems like you are really enjoying telling the story.

Piper wrote a great story. It’s got everything. It’s got questions of morality. It’s got questions of consciousness and what makes us human. It’s got issues of ecology, corporate responsibilities, and what is the role of government. It’s got all this stuff and it’s all shoved, when Piper did it, into a story that’s like 51,000 words. Which, if you think about it, is kind of remarkable. Little Fuzzy has pretty much has everything. There was a lot to play with. I could pick and choose which things to tweak and which things to bring in entirely myself. And when the only reason that you’re really doing it is because it’s a fun exercise for you, then the pressure is off. It’s like when I first wrote Agents to the Stars and Old Man’s War. I didn’t have to worry about having this deadline or doing these things. I didn’t have people expecting this or that to happen in this particular book. When you have no pressure and there are no expectations and the only thing that you’re doing is just enjoying yourself, you do enjoy yourself because who cares if you screw it up. Besides, if I’d screwed it up entirely, the only person who’d ever know would be me.

And, yes, I do have affection for Piper and for his work. I didn’t come into this saying, “I can do what Piper did and I can do it better,” because that’s stupid and it would get me killed. People would come to me with pitchforks and torches. I like what Piper did and I wondered how it would be different if someone were writing it today as opposed to in 1960. And that’s, basically, what the difference is. Same story, fifty years difference.

Some people will be morally opposed to Fuzzy Nation. “How dare you go and take this work somebody else did and appropriate it for yourself.” And I can understand that. I have a library of my own intellectual property. I have my own titles. If someone came in and said, “I’ve written an Old Man’s War book!” I’d be like, “The hell you say?” So I totally understand where [people opposed to Fuzzy Nation] are coming from, but I look at it this way. Right now I have my titles and I have my books and I have my universes and I want to be the one who is the primary author of them, because I wrote them. But eventually I’m going to shuffle off, eventually my work is either going to survive or it’s not. Part of the way that works survive is that people keep coming to them again and again and they keep finding new things. A works speaks to them in new ways. Why is Shakespeare so successful while Christopher Marlowe, who is more or less contiguous in time, is much less so? Because people just keep coming again and again to Shakespeare’s works and adapting them and changing them and finding new ways to bring the stories forward. It doesn’t hurt Shakespeare at all to have West Side Story.

A lot of young readers under the age of 30 haven’t read Piper. When I put up on my site that I’d written a book based on H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy, a bunch of my readers went out and checked out Little Fuzzy at Project Gutenberg or they downloaded it for the Kindle or the Nook. All of a sudden, there were more people reading Piper that day than there had been the day before. The object here is not to put a stake in Piper’s body and say, “I am the Fuzzy master now!” That would be stupid. The original reason I wrote this book was for fun, but now that it’s actually come out, it says to people, “This is a great story. Check out the guy who actually thought it up the first time. Check out his stuff because it’s so good. Even if it’s written with a 50s or 60s sensibility. There’s lots of stuff that has a sensibility from earlier times that we still read. We still read the Brontes; we still read Jane Austen. It’s not a crime to have that more distant sensibility, but it does lend itself to re-creation. If by bringing attention to the Fuzzy-verse with this book I get more people to read Piper, then everybody wins.

The trick for you, it seems, was getting the tone just right so there was no trace of anything that could be construed as arrogance or as you trying, as you say, to put a stake in Piper’s body. The thing in the early chapters that got me, that put me completely and entirely into the story, was Carl. You must be a dog lover to have written Carl.

Carl is there for a couple of reasons. Partly, he humanizes Jack Holloway. My Jack Holloway, not to put too fine a point on it, is a bit of an asshole, right? He’s arrogant. He breaks rules. He does what he wants to do. The first two chapters are basically Jack brow-beating his poor survey representative into doing what Jack wants him to do. Jack spouts legal cases at him. Jack goes, “Wow, you really screwed up, now you have to give me what I want.” My Jack Holloway is basically a dick. The fact that he has a dog certainly helps because if your dog loves you that means that you might have some good in your soul.

The other thing with Carl is that, for me, I wanted to have someone there who was an observer of the situation that could be a fun participant, someone that isn’t going to be judging things and still play a role. And Carl certainly does play a role. He’s the guy who sets off the thing that puts the whole plot in motion.

I had a dog when I wrote Fuzzy Nation. I am a dog lover, so it was fun to put a dog in and have that dog have some of the qualities of my own dog. My cats are in there as well. It’s not any coincidence that these Fuzzies have very distinct personalities, and those personalities, to some extent, are based on my pets.

We get pretty well attached to each of the Fuzzies, to Pinto and Baby and Papa, in a pretty short period of time. It seems, in some ways, that Carl is setting us up to be able to do that. Carl gives us one end of the continuum of sentience and he puts is in a state of mind that we’re willing to accept the Fuzzies. Carl is doing a lot.

You make a good point. The point of the book is to set up the question, “Where on the line of intelligence do these creature [the Fuzzies] lie?” When the book starts, there’s not necessarily an indication that these things are more than clever little animals. On one end of the scale, we have the humans who we know are clever and who can think and do all this other stuff. On the other end, we have someone like Carl who is a good “person” but he’s a dog. He’s got tricks, but you wouldn’t have a deep philosophical conversation with Carl about Kantian principles. “I oughta have a bone!” [Laughing] Or something along those lines. It does help to have these two poles and to ask where we place the Fuzzies in between them.

Carl’s also a straight man. He a straight man for Jack, because Jack’s got things he wants to do and Carl’s sort of an unwitting accomplice to a lot of them. Carl’s also a straight man for the Fuzzies — the Fuzzies just totally railroad Carl. They’re in there and they’re like, “We’re going to use you to get into the house. We’re going to use you to do all this other stuff.” And the dog is like, “Okay! I love you!” [Laughing] “I like you a lot!”

Also, again, because you know Carl likes Jack you hold out hope that Jack is not a complete asshole. If the dog is also okay with the Fuzzies that also creates a level of comfort there as well.

In the late-middle of the book, the dialogue starts to carry a lot more of the pacing. The dialogue starts to move much more of the freight. Ultimately, in the end, this becomes a book about whether or not people can talk and as we get closer to the question of whether or not the Fuzzies can talk the people are talking more and more. Or maybe this is just a craft decision to use dialogue to move the plot faster.

There are a couple of reasons. When you first start off with a book there is a lot of world-building that has to be done. You have to talk about what sunstones are or what the ecological practices of ZaraCorp are. You introduce particular people and so on and so forth. And you can’t do that all in dialogue because it would sound very didactic and it would sound very — you know the problem in science fiction, exposition, the whole, “As you know, Bob…” thing? You want to avoid that. You strike a balance. Telling what the sunstones are, how they got there, about ZaraCorp and the way it does, some of that can be carried by dialogue, but a lot of it just has to be written up.

As you go along, you’ve established who ZaraCorp is, what the sunstones are and what they mean, so a lot of that explanation and exposition can fall away and what you have is the actual things that the characters are doing. That’s why, in a craft sense, it becomes more dialogue-heavy at the end.

On the other hand, yes, this is a book about people communicating, and not just humans communicating, but Fuzzies, too. What can they say? Because of that, yes, absolutely, people talking to people matters.

Jack had a really hard time communicating with Isabel. It just wasn’t working. And that’s one of the reasons they broke up. They just weren’t working on that particular level of communication. As the book goes along, Jack has to learn to actually communicate with humans, not just railroad them to get what he wants, but actually to start negotiating with them, to use his words in order to achieve results. So absolutely, we come to a part where the dialogue, where discussion, where talking becomes particularly important. And, of course, the last third of the book is courtroom scenes so you have to be talking, anyway.

Did you have to do much research — legal, biological, environmental?

[Laughing] Tons! Tons!

Really?

No. [Laughing] No. I did a little bit. Obviously, you want to make sure whatever you’re writing has the feeling of verisimilitude, that it seems reasonable to the average person that things would work that particular way. You use reality as a springboard for something that is plausible. There’s a lot of law in Fuzzy Nation and a lot of the law in this particular book has no real world analog, because you’re talking about issues of sentience and issues of planetary ecology on a planet that is not earth and what the corporate responsibilities are for that. Basically, what you do is you take a flyer and you ask yourself. What seems reasonable?” It helps to have a good, basic grounding in biology or in the law, so you can extrapolate from there. But I don’t want to sound like I spent years and years and years at the law library looking at case law. A lot of it I relied on what I learn on a day-to-day basis and also what I learned when I was in college. I took classes in law when I was at college just because they interested me. A lot of that stuff still sticks with me.

You went to University of Chicago, right? I’ve noticed Chicago grads have a particular way of thinking — a distinctive depth and thoroughness.

My two top choices for college were University of Chicago and Bennington. Bennington was very arts-oriented and very cool. Creatively awesome. But the fact of the matter is I have absolutely no structure whatsoever. That’s why I’m married to a woman who actually gets shit done. Even at 18, I knew I was not the world’s most structured person. And here’s the University of Chicago … it had structure and I knew that having that structure imposed upon me would actually do me well.

Another way the University of Chicago was perfect for me is that it’s also very egalitarian. It’s one of the top ten universities, but it’s also amazingly egalitarian. It’s basically one of those places that says, “You said you can do this, do it. Don’t tell us you can do it, just do it.” When I got there I went to the college newspaper and I said, “I want to write a column, a humor column.” And they were like, “Ah, get out of here. Go away.” But I persisted. I came in the first week and said, “Here’s my humor column.” “Fine. We’ll take it. Don’t expect that we’ll run the next one.” Next week, I came in and said, “Here’s my second column.” They were like, “Fine. We’ll run this one, but don’t expect us to run the next one.” The next week I didn’t write anything. On Monday night — the thing comes out on Tuesday — Monday night, they give me a call, “Where the hell is your column?”

Ask a Chicago person how it’s going and his response will be, “Relative to what?” That’s just the way they are at Chicago.

Yes, at Chicago there’s a rigorousness of thought. Someone starts making an argument and you immediately just go, “Let me pull out my Socratic tools and go to town on you.” On one hand that makes us arrogant pricks, right? But on the other hand, you end up actually having some really interesting conversations and you attack problems from an interesting, methodical point of view. It’s been really useful for me in a strange sort of way on my website. Part of the reason is I have civil comments as opposed to flame wars is because I basically apply my Chicago-bred rhetorical skills and tell people, “You’re drifting off topic” or “What you said here makes absolutely no sense. You’re using this argument very poorly; you need to restate it or I’m going to slam you with the mallet of loving moderation. Oh no, sorry, the mallet of loving correctness. And it works. We have good comments because people understand that if they come in and spew a bunch of crap, they’re going to get slammed down.

So, yes, the University of Chicago has been very useful in terms of writing and on a day to day basis.

Backing up a little… I don’t see any structural problems or looseness in your fiction.

That’s because you don’t see process, you see product. I may flail or go off on tangents or do any number of things, but if I’m paying attention and I’m editing myself reasonably well and my editors are watching my back, these things are not going to be problems that you the reader are going to see, right? We’re going to correct them before they actually get out to you.

Also, part of that is an artifact of my writing style. I basically make this shit up as I go along. When I write something that seems at variance from what I’ve originally written, I change it. Like, if I write something in chapter eight that contradicts something that happened in chapter two but I like what’s in chapter eight, I will go back and change chapter two so that it now makes sense.

You do that back and forth, back and forth while you’re in the process of writing. Instead of writing a first draft and a second draft and then writing the third draft, you just go back and update it while you’re writing and basically you end up with a finished product that you don’t really have to do second and third drafts on, because you’ve already done a lot of the drafting in the actual production. And it looks really tight. It looks like everything is intentional and the reason it looks that way is because you’ve gone back and made those tweaks and adjustment as you’ve gone ahead. I think that is part of what you are seeing there. It’s an artifact of my particular process, of making those changes when they happen.

The other things is that there’s often times when I’m writing a book — not necessarily in the case of Fuzzy Nation because I was working from a template that already existed, but certainly with other books — part of the reason that I write them is to find out what happens next and when a variance pops up, I’m like, “Oh, here’s how I can solve that problem and now it makes sense.” I put in stuff earlier on that doesn’t necessarily make sense to put in at the time but then later on I’ll be like, “Ah, now I can use that!”

I just finished a novel today. Like two hours ago. At the very end of it I referenced something that happened in the very first chapter and I had no intention of doing that until I was there and I was like, “Wow, this would actually tie in very well.” So when you read that two years from now when it actually comes out in book form, you’ll look at it and go, “Wow! That really ties it together.” And it will look intentional, like I meant to do that, but, in fact, it was just like, “Oh, I have this loose thread, here, let me pull that in.”

A lot of what you’re seeing as structural consistency looks, during the process, very messy indeed.

So having Piper’s template there — I can’t tell if that would be an intrusion or a relief.

In this case there was something else that was going on when I was writing Fuzzy Nation that it was very useful for me. Prior to writing Fuzzy Nation I would end up writing five- or six-thousand words in a day, but my brain would then turn into custard and I wouldn’t be able to write again for pretty much three or four days because it was just so much writing, so much “where does this piece go, where does that piece go, how does this make it all work” and my brain would get tired. I eventually decided that was a really stupid thing to do. It wasn’t a very efficient use of my time to do 6,000 words and then take a week off. It made no sense. Aside from wanting to have this relaxing project, I was doing the equivalent of what a golfer does when he changes his swing. I went and changed my writing process. I went from writing 6,000 words at one time then taking a week off to seeing if I could write a solid 2,000 words a day. 2,000 words is not difficult for me. Part of that has to do with having worked as a newspaper writer and having to write a lot of stuff very quickly and basically having to have lots of words at one time. 2,000 was enough that I felt like I was getting progress, but not so much writing that I felt exhausted. My brain felt like I still had some reserves left over to do other things. So, in this particular case, it was nice to have a template to work from so that I didn’t actually have to do that part of the process. I knew where the book was going at all times so I could just focus on writing the particular story.

On the new novel that I just finished I was making it up as I went along and also doing the 2,000 words a day and that seemed to work just fine.

These are the things you do to make sure you don’t end up shooting yourself in the foot in terms of getting stuff done. It’s much easier for me now to do a regular 2,000 words than it was to do 6,000 words and then take a few days off. The hardest part for me of any project is not the writing of it. The writing’s very simple. It’s the starting of the project or the starting it up again after I’ve taken several days off. I just sit there and say, “I could write more or… I could read Gizmodo.”

This was a good way for me to avoid continual procrastination.

Because you’re writing spontaneously, do you have trouble keeping it all in your mind? After a week off, are you going back and re-reading the first 30,000 words before you write the next 2,000? Do you have to remind yourself of chapter one when you’re working on chapter two or ten?

Generally speaking, I don’t have that much of a problem keeping what I’m doing in the novel in the “buffer”. This may sound arrogant, but keeping track of 100,000 words is not that difficult. Or at least it’s not for me.

Now, I do read some of what I had just written the day before, so that it will be a start-in, a run-in to the same rhythm and so forth, but in terms of keeping track of plot points and such that’s generally not too difficult. I know that what I’ve done in chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, I’ll have to address in chapter 17 or chapter 18. I know things are coming up or that there are things that I’ll need to go back and fix and so on and so forth. It’s not too complicated in that regard.

Lastly, what do you enjoy about this whole process — the process of making a novel?

A lot of the times when I’m writing I don’t know what I’m going to write next, so it’s fun for me to discover what happens in the story. Basically, I get to be the first reader in that respect. I get to find out what comes out of my own brain. Sometimes it’s not surprising; sometimes it’s completely surprising. Every once in a while I’ll go back and read one of my novels — Android’s Dream is a perfect example — and I just look at it and I go, “I must’ve been so high. I must’ve been so high when I thought this shit up. I don’t know where that came from, but… oh, my God!” If I’d read Android’s Dream and they were like, “Want to meet the author?” “I don’t know. He sounds kind of weird.”

It’s fun to pull at the nether regions of my creative brain and see what gets hauled up. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. For me, that’s a lot of the fun of the creative process.

The other thing is that when you’re writing, when you are into it, there’s that concept Mihály Csíkszentmihályi talked about called Flow where everything is just going and you’re not thinking about the fact that you’re doing something, you’re just doing it, and you become totally involved in the process and everything else falls away and you’re focusing on this world that you’re creating. The nice thing about being able to write fiction is that every day is an invitation to slip into this Flow, to slip into this entirely new world that only you can see at the moment but that you will soon be sharing with everybody else.

On the best days, it all just comes together and you’re like, “I can’t believe this is my job!” Now, there are days, of course, when it doesn’t work and you’re like, “I can’t believe this is my job!” Happily, on balance, there have been more good days than bad ones.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor living in his wife’s hometown. He is on the board of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, the Hub City Writers Project, and is the interview editor for the Southern Nature Project. In July of 2008, he and Jeff VanderMeer launched Shared Worlds at Wofford College, a creative writing and world-building sumer program for high school students.

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