Science into Fiction Speculative Fiction Writing Workshop Series

- transcript from the 2003 SF Writing Workshop instant-messenger discussion with Stan Schmidt -

tmseay: Hi, Stan. This is Thomas Seay over at Jim Gunn's workshop. Are you just about set up to begin?

stanleyschmidt44: Yep, all set!

cmckit: All right. We're gathering the horses over here, so if you can give us just a moment or two, we'll be ready to go.

cmckit: We have eighteen of us over here, with far too many questions to stuff into any amount of time...

stanleyschmidt44: And only one of me over here! I have plenty of answers ("I don't know" is a useful one); I hope some of them fit.

cmckit: The first question is from Nolen Harsh: What do you look for in a Probability Zero submission?

stanleyschmidt44: First, a PZ should be _under_ 1000 words. Second, it should have a clear, sharp punch line. Those goals usually require trimming any extraneous detail from the setup. Ideally, the punchline should be something that sounds perfectly plausible until you think about it and see a fatal flaw in the premises or logic that makes it nonsense (hence the name).

cmckit: From Pat Buehler: May I share transcripts of this and last year's interview with my writer's group? (It's online: Other Worlds Writers' Workshop.)

stanleyschmidt44: I don't see any problem with that.

cmckit: Thanks!
From Pat Buehler: What's the best short story you've ever read and why do you like it?

stanleyschmidt44: It's usually hard for me to pick a single "best" anything, but I can mention 1 or 2 that stand out. Bob Shaw's "Light of Other Days": very short, combining one of the most original, thought-provoking ideas with an understated but compelling human story. And, if I can stretch the definition of "short story" to include novelette, the original version of Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon," which does astonishing things with telling a completely new kind of human story from a single viewpoint that changes continuously and radically through the story. (Dan told me that once he realized who the right viewpoint character was, the story wrote itself, but I don't believe him!)

cmckit: From Thomas Seay: What are your favorite stories outside the SF genre? How about fantasy?

stanleyschmidt44: I really like some kinds of fantasy, particularly the ones with the sorts of flavor associated with John W. Campbell's _Unknown_ magazine. I'm also partial to humor, especially whimsical and/or satirical - e.g., James Thurber. And I assume we're not talking only about prose, so I'll also mention some of the plays of George Bernard Shaw, which turn conventional views upside down and look at them from new angles. (In fact, Campbell and Shaw were probably the two major influences on my own editorials.)

cmckit: From Larry Taylor: What are your pet peeves in a story? Not the physical manuscript, but the content.

stanleyschmidt44: I strongly dislike stories in which the characters fail to make any serious effort to solve their problems when they should be able to. This does _not_ mean I always want happy endings (hey, I'm the guy who made this whole galaxy uninhabitable in _The Sins of the Fathers_!), but it does mean that if the characters can't solve their problems, it should be because the problems are genuinely too big, not because the characters are too small. Of course, I could give you a much longer list but it wouldn't fit in this box. I listed 26 in "The Ideas That Wouldn't Die," originally in Writer's Digest, later reprinted in our _Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy_.

cmckit: From Jennifer Schwabach: How likely are you to print a story where "the science is social science?"

stanleyschmidt44: It happens fairly often - e.g., the main science in Donald Kingsbury's _Courtship Rite_ is sociological - though I must add the caution that if you're writing about the future, it's very hard to deal _only_ with social science, because other things change too. E.g., if you'd been trying 100 years ago to imagine how society would be different in 2003, you wouldn't come anywhere close unless you thought not only about people but also about technologies that would affect how they live, like telephones, airplanes, cars, and computers.

cmckit: From Kelly Green: Hi, Stan! Last year at Con Jose you mentioned you were looking for stories handling economic issues. Have you received any? Can you define "economic issues" better?

stanleyschmidt44: I haven't seen as many as I'd like; they're hard. That's a good question to which I haven't prepared an answer, so this is a first draft: "Economic issues" are questions of how resources are used, allocated, and distributed. E.g., if nanotechnology eventually does it make it as easy to produce almost anything as some researchers imagine, our whole huge economic system of employment and commerce will be unnecessary. So what sort of social order will replace it - and how will we get from here to there without tearing our society apart in the process? Closer to home, some of my editorials have complained that we've been so conditioned to think of jobs as (Continued in next)

stanleyschmidt44: Intrinsic goods that we're missing a huge opportunity for everybody to have lots more leisurely time, and instead wasting huge amounts of many people's time and resources creating jobs that don't need to be done. Question, and a very suitable subject for "What if?" stories: How can we stop the waste, shed the self-destructive assumptions, and create a society in which all the _necessary_ work is being done efficiently, people are fed and sheltered, and nobody's doing work just for work's sake?

cmckit: From Matthew Candelaria: I started reading Moonstruck, and it seems a fairly standard plot. What stood out about it that made you decide to buy it?

stanleyschmidt44: Short, sneaky answer: Keep reading and find out! I assure you, he has some big surprises up his sleeve - and those are why I bought it.

cmckit: From Matthew Candelaria: Other than Analog, Asimov's, and F&SF, are there any magazines you recommend reading, or read regularly yourself?

stanleyschmidt44: I assume we're not limiting this to science fiction. Several "unrelated" magazines are good sources of ideas and background knowledge - e.g., Scientific American, National Geographic, Astronomy, and Natural History. One of the best, if you can get your hands on it (it's published in the UK and expensive and hard to find in the US) is New Scientist.

cmckit: From Jim Gunn: Astounding/Analog has had only 5 editors over its 73 years. Isn't that unusual? And only three in the past 66. Reason?

stanleyschmidt44: It's too much fun to leave! Yes, it is unusual, but John and I both found it a uniquely satisfying kind of work to do and stayed with it for a long time. Ben had his own reasons for only staying 7 years (which still isn't _that_ short a time for an editor to be in one place), including wanting to write full-time and then being lured to Omni), but he still feels a special relationship to the magazine and appears in it fairly often. As for why we've been able to stay that long, I think it's just that we're sufficiently typical readers of the magazine that we can give the others a lot of what they want just by editing for ourselves, as if we had to buy our own subscription and could only afford one.

cmckit: From Jim: What do you consider your contribution?

stanleyschmidt44: Keeping Analog alive, and itself, this long after many people feared it would die with John. I think Analog's distinction is that it pretty consistently tries to insist on not only good stories, but stories that have a reasonably plausible scientific basis, so they're not only fantastic, but at least somewhat possible. Most other publishers have largely abandoned that criterion, and I'm rather proud to have been able to maintain one place that still insists on it. Of course, it gets misunderstood a lot - I hear from a wearisome number of people who think Analog is more interested in "rivets," and less interested in people, than it actually is.

cmckit: From Jim: What is the future for Analog? Problems? Opportunities?

stanleyschmidt44: I hope it will keep doing what I've tried to describe for a long time - which does _not_ mean doing the same thing over and over, because there are always new ideas and possibilities to consider! Our biggest challenge is to bring in new readers, especially young ones. We're very good at keeping readers interested once they've found us, but many people like the sort of thing we're doing but don't know we're doing it. Any suggestions on how to get their attention are always appreciated! Assuming we can do well enough at that, we have the opportunity to do what SF has long done: inspire young readers to turn our imagined futures into real ones (or, in the case of ones we don't like, how to prevent them!).

cmckit: From Adrian Simmons: Is there a theme that you feel has been overdone? Will you be happy if you never see a nanobot story ever again? No more generation space ships?

stanleyschmidt44: There are lots of themes that have been overdone (see the aforementioned "The Ideas That Wouldn't Die"!), but that doesn't necessarily mean I never want to see them again - it just means it will take a lot of skill to breathe new life into them. One of my ideas (#3), which I've called "Computer Plot A," I've seen in many hundreds of utterly forgettable stories - but I've also seen it as Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game." Incidentally, some ideas we may as well resign ourselves to seeing in many if not most stories because they're so likely. Ignoring nanobots in visions of the future, for instance, may well be like a 1903 writer ignoring electricity in visions of 2003 because "it's been done to death"!

cmckit: From David Kirtley: You recently published a good story called "A Green Thumb" by Tobias S. Buckell. What was it about this story that drew your attention?

stanleyschmidt44: I enjoyed reading it. That may sound like a flippant answer, but it isn't really. Readers don't decide to like a story by analyzing it or grading it on a set of scales, though they may apply such analysis afterward to try to figure out _why_ they liked it. As an editor, my decision to buy or not buy is based quite largely on "gut feeling." If it doesn't leap out of the pile and grab my interest enough to make me read slowly and carefully, out it goes; no further analysis required. If it does grab me, and especially if it makes me forget I'm reading and just drop into its world for the duration, then there's a good chance I'll buy it - though first I have to go over it with a finetoothed comb looking for any nits readers might pick. If I find any, I try to help the author fix them.

cmckit: From Larry Taylor: If you could change one thing in publishing, what would you change?

stanleyschmidt44: That's a good question, and not an easy one, in part because publishing differs from place to place. But I think the one thing that bothers me most about current book publishing (it's not true at Analog, by the way) is that too much emphasis in purchase decisions is placed on the author's name and past earnings record and not enough on the intrinsic qualities of the work itself. I'd like to see the emphasis shifted a lot the other way, though I realize it's not as easy as it sounds. Most publishers are, after all, in business to make money, and even if that isn't their _primary_ interest, they do have to make enough to stay in business.

cmckit: From Larry Taylor: What are the most troublesome flaws with many alternate history submissions?

stanleyschmidt44: My answer is peculiar to Analog: they don't involve a sufficiently fundamental change in history. There is certainly a market elsewhere for alternate histories that hinge on something like "What if the other side had won this battle?," but in general that doesn't have any profound significance for the world, just people. But I can get very interested in an alternate history that involves something as drastic as _Homo sapiens_ not coming to the New World when they did on our timeline, so that one of the earlier hominids, and a bunch of megafauna, were still thriving in the Americas when Europeans finally got here. I published a series based on that one by Harry Turtledove, which eventually became the book _A Different Flesh_.

cmckit: from Chuck Marsters: The SciFi channel was believed, by many SF fans, as a "wonderful" opportunity to expand the audience nationwide. However, many of us feel it has let us down because its content isn't very exciting or challenging. If you were "king," what changes would you want to make to its programming?

stanleyschmidt44: I probably can't give a very fair answer to this since I haven't watched the SciFi channel much - but if I were king, I'd like to see a lot more (I've seen very few) faithful dramatizations of memorable stories from the magazines (including, he said unsurprisingly) Analog.

cmckit: From Thomas Seay: We've been watching a DVD that contains a lengthy documentary showing John W. Campbell developing an idea with his authors. Do you interact with your authors in this sort of collaborative manner? If not, why not? How else do you interact with your authors?

stanleyschmidt44: Yes, I do, when the writers are interested and find that method helpful to them. Some do, some don't; I don't try to force it on anyone not comfortable with it, but there are several who thrive on it and we get a lot done over lunch or dinner in New York or at conventions. Others prefer to do everything in writing, and we have lengthy dialogues about their stories by letter or e-mail. I think it's a carryover from my years of teaching at a small college, where I worked closely with several hundred students and never met two whose minds worked the same way. Now I like to try to meet writers as early in our relationship as possible, find out what works best for each one, and then do that.

cmckit: Thanks for your time, patience, and candor! Would it be all right if we publish this interview on the website for the Center for the Study of SF?

stanleyschmidt44: Quite, and thank you all, too!

- end transmission -

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