An Interview with Suncatcher Author Alia Gee
It’s 2075
in a post-climate change, post-pandemic, post-peak oil world. Professor
Radicand Jones has earned a nice quiet sabbatical on her sister’s solar powered
airship, floating serenely above it all. Instead, Radicand finds herself:
Defending the airship flock against pirates with nothing but her rifle and her wits.
Risking her mind every time she goes deeper into the enhanced virtual reality of the aether—just like her father before her.
Helping her best friend escape from bounty hunters determined to keep her genetic property under corporate control.
Falling in love with a killer. He has a heart of gold. It might belong to someone else.
Happy endings may look easy in the sky, but can Radicand Jones save everyone else’s hearts and minds without losing her own?
__________
Alia is a self published author, and a fellow Oberlin College graduate. She and I started chatting recently when I took note of her book on the web and reached out to ask her about. I'm happy and honored that she agreed to do this interview which follows her bio below.
Alia Gee was raised on a steady diet of science fiction and
the kindness of strangers. She is grateful for both.
Alia has loved Rumi, solar power, and her husband for a very
long time. She recently fell in love with Occupy Wall Street. Now she lives and
loves in New York City raising her eyebrows at her children and her glass to
art and her voice in the streets.
Her poetry has been published in
The Omnibus of Doctor Bill Shakes and the Magnificent Ionic Pentatetrameter
and the
forthcoming Poetry for the 99%.
Suncatcher is her first novel.
1. Let's start with the basics. How long have you been interested in science fiction?
Since my parents told me that I was named after a science fiction
character.
They explained that they were young and stupid (they really said this. At
least they were honest) and named me after this great character, a saint, no
less! … but then a couple of years after I was named the second book in the
series came out and little Alia goes crazy and kills herself. Apparently they
wrote Frank Herbert and explained the situation and he wrote them a lovely
letter back saying that it was ok, it was a real name before he used it and
told them it meant “exalted one” in Arabic, don’t panic.
As far as I know, though, they were young and stupid AND LOST THE LETTER.
One of those things I may never be able to forgive them for… sigh.
I remember the first SF book I read was The Menace from Earth when
I was 9, and I devoured all the Heinlein juveniles my dad had. Then all the
ones the library had. I read Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and all those
Adventure-type stories with the rocket ship on the spine. My mom tried to steer
me towards Ursula K. LeGuin but I wasn’t ready for her yet. (I could wax poetic
about Always Coming Home, the best book I’ve never finished, for hours.)
Round about the same time I really started to accept that I was not being
taken seriously by my science teachers (“but you’re going to be an English
major, so I won’t sign the form that will let you take Chemistry even though
you have the second highest grade in the class” “next year you’ll discover
boys, so I won’t sign the form that will let you take physics even though you
have the highest grade in the class”, I realized that Heinlein and the other
Adventure SF writers didn’t really take English majors seriously, either, and I
drifted away from hard SF for a long time.
I didn’t really get back into it again until I discovered Lois McMaster
Bujold. She’s my current favorite SF author—though I think The Curse of
Chalion and Paladin of Souls are her best work and they are pure
fantasy. Nobody’s perfect. ;)
I’ve also become quite fond of John Scalzi, mainly because of his blog
but his books are fun, too.
2. Are you influenced by other
types of speculative fiction, or other types of writing in general?
Anything Bujold writes, see above.
;) Also, anything that Terry Pratchett writes even when he forgets to be funny
and lapses into poignancy. Damnit, Pratchett, stop making me cry.
I was really influenced by web
comics, when I was writing this book. I had a newborn, and that made reading
books difficult, but I had a long list of webcomics that I could squeeze in
between nursing and changing diapers and wiping noses. That pacing and emphasis
on punchy dialogue really affected the way I wrote this novel. (I did write a
different book as my “first first
novel” and it was excellent practice and no I’m not planning on publishing it
any time soon because it has no drama.)
3. When did you get the idea for Suncatcher? Was there a particular moment, or did it evolve over time?
3. When did you get the idea for Suncatcher? Was there a particular moment, or did it evolve over time?
You know how they talk about rock bands that suddenly get
discovered, but actually they’ve been working for years in their Mom’s
basement? That. But here’s the overnight success version, because that is
pretty long just by itself…
I was reading a blog, http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/,
which is not updated often enough and takes a dim view of steampunk that
whitewashes alternate history.
Jha Goh, the blogger, was interviewing an author (much like
our situation here) who claimed to have written a Third Wave Feminist Steampunk
Adventure and I almost fainted from trying to hit the buy button on Amazon too
hard. This, this was what I wanted to read! Pretty dresses and adventure with
female protagonists but alive to intersectionality and nuance and stuff!
Only it didn’t. It was so so so disappointing I spent a very
long Facebook status detailing just how terrible it was—it was literally Mary
Sue Saves The Brown People, but it’s alright because even though she’s been
raised white and privileged her *mother* was (albino) but Brown! So it’s ok!
…oh, and she had phenomenal cosmic powers and there was a weird love triangle
between her and a white guy and a brown guy, and she loved them equally so she
wasn’t racist. And both guys loved her, but then the brown guy sacrificed
himself/their love by staying behind to save His People, so she ends up with
the white guy. But it wasn’t racist. Oh, no… and then there was the part where
she “taught” the brown people to garden, and they planted PEAS NEXT TO THE
PUMPKINS. (That’s a cool weather crop next to a hot weather crop. Even with
cosmic powers, THAT JUST DOESN’T sdgebyx cmyoi suy YT…
You can see I *still* feel strongly about this, eh?
So anyway, I’m ranting and ranting and my friend commented,
“So why don’t you write a feminist
steampunk adventure, then?”
And I did. Or at least, I tried to.
It turns out I can’t write alternate history because I’m
enough of a history buff that I can’t forget what I know and pretend it didn’t
happen, so pure steampunk was out. But I started out with the Bechdel test— hey, random, did
you know she went to Oberlin, too? We Obies get everywhere!—two women talking
about something besides a guy. Two women…. Sisters! Right, so I needed to have
two women talking, and I was thinking about steampunk, and so what’s more
steampunk than pirates?
I hammered out a 2000ish word scene about two sisters on an
airship discussing the imminent approach of pirates and posted it on Facebook. And that’s when things got interesting—several people
commented, “That was great… but then what happened?”
6 months and 456 pages later, I can honestly say quite a
lot. (And then I edited it and edited it and edited it some more…)
4. Is your book a single-person perspective, or do you have
a wide cast of characters that the "camera" follows like Game of
Thrones?
I was learning about the world as I wrote it, so it
definitely follows the perspective of the protagonist, Radicand Jones. However,
I found that extra stuff kept appearing, emails and restaurant menus and inter
departmental memos, and I really enjoyed incorporating them into the story.
Later they began to tell their own story in counterpoint to Radicand’s lived
experience, and I hope they flesh things out that the reader would otherwise
have to take on faith.
5. Tell us a bit about the world your story takes place in.
(When does it take place, what's the "mood" of the setting(s))
It’s a cheerful dystopia! …an early reader called it that,
and I love that description. It’s specifically set above and within Miami in June,
2075. But this is a world that has been changed by peak oil, pandemic, and
climate change. For instance, Miami (and New York City, too) are walled cities
surrounded by shallow sea water.
It’s pretty terrible—but when I was writing it swine flu had
just sent half a nearby school home sick, the gulf oil spill and Katrina were
freaking me out and I was reading a lot of doomer blogs just as Lehman Brothers
imploded and it seemed like corporations were taking over everything and the
world was a few breaths away from neo fascism forever and ever and everything owned
by Monsanto.
The future was holding my babies hostage, and I had to do
something about that.
So I had to create, almost for my own sanity, this world
where all the scary things had happened, but my grandchildren could still grow
and laugh and have meaningful lives.
6. Many characters in stories are based on people the author
actually knows in real life. Are there any like that in your story?
They are all me, especially the bad guys.
7. As many of my blog followers may know, having reasonably
accurate science in science fiction is very important to me. How much of the
science in your book is real, based on known science, or a projection of what
current science thinks might be possible?
Heh. Well, in the 4.5 years from when I first started it the
“goggles” that I thought were super-cool and bleeding edge are just another
form factor of what apple is doing. (Damnit, apple!)
I spent a lot of time with websites that predicted rates of
sea level rising, on best to worst case scenarios, and talked to my friend the
meteorologist about what climate changed storms would look like. (“That’s a
good question, I should pose it to my students on their next paper,” was his
first response.)
I researched airships and worked out a rough idea of how my
flock of airships worked engineering-wise (hard envelopes, rather than the soft
blimps we’re more familiar with) so that I wouldn’t screw up—and even then we
almost made design choices that would have sent them nose first into the ocean.
The tech I took the most liberties with is something I
called the “aether”… and this started out as a nod to steampunk but it became
integral to a lot of things that were important to me and to the story. The
aether is a “metaphor based virtual reality” and it was my way of making room
for English majors in science fiction.
The seed of it came from a friend, who wanted to develop a
hardware interface so that grade school children could “dance math”… He’s a bit
of a mad professor, and I don’t know how far he got on that project, but his
love of math and this idea that you could move your body to manipulate data
meshed with my desire for beauty in my science fiction… So yeah. The aether is
pretty out there, but it’s also very pretty.
8. What themes or storylines in your story do you hold to be
the most important to you?
Community. Connections. Loyalty. Love. My editor thought
that human identity and ownership were key, too. But honestly I think the story
has enough complexity that you see the themes you want to see.
9. Do you think this book is geared for a specific
demographic? Is it accessible to a broad range of readers?
I really don’t know. I want it to be. People who want to be
entertained and are willing to trust me for a couple of hours. Anyone in that
demographic should love it!
10. Describe what your method is. Do you sit down and write
the book all the way though and then edit? Edit as you go? Do you have a
particular ritual you do to get into the "writing groove?"
During the baby’s afternoon nap I’d sketch out ideas and
what-ifs and future scenes I wanted to allude to or get to. In the evening
after the kids were in bed and I was back at my laptop I would read the last
scene and maybe check my outline to see where I was and where I was planning on
going. Then with the afternoon’s notes on hand I would write out the dialogue,
as fast as it came, often without tags or “she saids” just bam bam bam. Then
I’d go back and write the in-between bits, the action, the description, the
internal monologues.
Best advice I got was not to end my writing at the end of a
chapter, but to write the first sentence or two of the next scene and then end
so that when I came back to it the next day I could just keep going, rather
than try and recreate the energy I was riding the day before.
I did a lot of light editing as I went, as things became
more or less important—whole airship crews got deleted from earlier scenes
because they just weren’t important to the plot.
11. What was your motivation for self publishing? What were
the challenges you faced with moving forward on it? What triumphs did you
achieve?
Well, Tor declined to publish it and Baen never got back to
me. Those are the only SF publishers who will accept unsolicited manuscripts
without an agent. Neil Gaiman’s agent did ask for the full manuscript, and I
almost cried when I got that letter—but ultimately she wasn’t excited enough by
it to take me on as a client.
All the other agents who take SF authors sent very polite
rejection letters with my first query. That was a brutal 12 months of
rejection. Later, a friend told me that she had drinks with a friend of
a friend who was an agent, and mentioned my book to her, and apparently the
agent wrinkled her nose and said, “A book about a middle aged
Pakistani-American? Who would want to read that?”
So whether or not I wanted to go the traditional publishing
route, traditional publishing did not want me.
I think the Suncatcher-verse is rich with potential (and I
have a couple more books stuck in my head) …but they are very stuck. I thought
that if I could get this first book out of my head and unable to be edited any
longer (just one more edit, I can quit any time!) I could focus my energy on
writing new material.
I decided to self-publish over a year ago, but then the
problem was finding an editor. I knew I had taken it as far as I could, but the
story deserved proper editing. It was really hard finding someone who would
take my money but not give me BS about “show don’t tell” … that is the worst
feedback ever, because believe me if I knew what it meant I would do it.
So yeah, finding an editor was really hard. In the end it
was word of mouth and grabbing someone who wasn’t professionally trained but
had experience helping another author shape her work. His feedback really
helped me understand the villain and the villain’s story better, and I hope
that will make the next book easier to write.
My most glorious moment so far was when I was freaking out
about cover art, and a friend (also from Oberlin. Ha!) found the perfect image.
It was black and white, though—but then an online community she belongs to sort
of adopted the project and added color to the image.
I got tears in my eyes, and it really made me believe in
this project, the first time I saw that airship sail through a blue sky into a
yellow sun.
12. And where can we get Suncatcher?
Suncatcher, is available from these sellers:
(where the first 9 chapters are free to read online)
—and your local bookstore can order it for you, too!
Read global, shop local. ;)
__________
A big thank you goes out to Alia for this interview. On a final, happy note:
Alia Gee can be found at:
and
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