Those Who Can...

[the February 2001 interview]

by Karen Bennett

[I interviewed SF author James Alan Gardner twice while I was Editor of the fanzine The Voyageur: in February 2001 and January 2003. Below are both interviews, in chronological order. Author photo: John Sutherland.]

KB: What novel are you writing, and is Festina Ramos going to show up on page 150 or so?

JAG: I'm now writing a novel with the working title of Those Who Can... a lousy title that I intend to change when I think of something better. [The final title was Trapped; see interview below—Ed.] It's set in the League of Peoples universe, but it takes place on Earth so Festina won't put in an appearance. (Earth is out of bounds to the Technocracy, for reasons that I still haven't clarified.)

My 10-words-or-less summary of the story is "high school teachers save the world." I like high school teachers (my father was one) and they're nice characters to put in the role of heroes. A high school chemistry teacher, for example, knows a bit more about science than your average Joe in the street, but is not going to be the sort of super-genius we see in a lot of SF, able to whip together a mind-boggling new concoction just in time to save the day. My group of teachers are not superheroes (or even highly trained troubleshooters like Festina Ramos); they're just everyday slightly-better-than-average types who find themselves in the middle of a world-shaking mess and have to do something about it.

What colour is your kung fu sash now?

I am now a blue sash. At our school, the colours go novice (no sash), red, yellow, orange, green, blue, brown, black. In April, I'll be grading for my brown sash, but I've still got a lot of hard work before I'll be ready.

In an interview in Challenging Destiny [July 1998] you said you wished that SF produced more stuff that you want to read and that you enjoy reading. Has your wish come true in the past three years?

Not a whole lot. I've read a few good books in that time, but SF is still full of books that are trying to be important rather than fun.

Has there been a difference in readers' reactions to the sperm-tail technology in Expendable, Vigilant and Hunted based on the reader's gender? My reaction was, "Why did you pick that image and not a tornado?"

No reader has ever talked to me about sperm-tails. Maybe everybody is too embarrassed. But I think the analogy to sperm is more apt than to a tornado because of the way the tails whip around at random if they aren't held down. They're also very long and thin, sometimes thousands of kilometres long but only a hand's breadth wide. They work something like tornados, but I think they look very much like sperm.

If you were to collaborate with another writer (one who's alive now), who would it be?

The only ones I can imagine are my wife, Linda Carson (a playwright who occasionally talks about writing a novel but has yet to do more than a few dozen pages on anything), and my friend John McMullen (who has absolutely great ideas and writes very well, but again who hasn't yet managed to finish anything at novel length). I can imagine working with either of them to get something finished...but neither of them has ever asked me to collaborate, and they certainly don't need my help IF THEY'D JUST SIT DOWN AND FINISH SOMETHING!

Tells "the Absolute Truth"

[the January 2003 interview]

by Karen Bennett

KB: The paperback version of Trapped came out in October 2002. What has reaction to it been like?

JAG: Reaction to my books is always quiet—a few e-mails, a few news postings, and not much else. Of course, I would love to have beautiful groupies throwing themselves at my feet in paroxysms of ecstasy, but mostly it's a lot of positive reviews and three-line messages, "Hey, I liked your book." Trapped is therefore getting the same response as all my other novels.

Eos has accepted your proposal for your next novel, Radiant. You've said on your website, "I don't have much to say about it ... except that it will feature Festina Ramos and a novice Explorer who's uncannily like a young version of Festina herself." Can you tell us any more about it now?

Radiant features a young Explorer fresh from the academy who accompanies Festina to a planet that sent out a mayday two seconds before going completely silent. They find a Mary Celeste situation (everyone's disappeared, reason unknown) and must figure out what happened. Also involved are intelligent clouds, miniature T-Rexes, an insane Explorer, and the Balrog from Hunted. (The Balrog is a major player in the story; the central question of the book is "What does it mean to be more than human, and would you choose to be so if you had the chance?")

Speaking of Balrogs ... what did you think of the Balrog in Lord of the Rings part 1, The Fellowship of the Ring?

I liked the Balrog. Like most fans of the original books, I worried that we'd see something cheesy ... or at least cheesier than the Balrog that existed in my imagination. But the movie version was much better than I feared. I wasn't blown away by it—I don't think any visual representation could live up to the emotional one in my head—but the movie's Balrog was good enough that it didn't ruin the mood. That alone is a huge accomplishment.

Former Explorer Opal Quintelle, who's a minor character in Trapped, struck me as uncannily like Festina as well—although she isn't Festina. Does this tie into Radiant? Is there a secret conspiracy about clones of Festina? (Are you making your readers paranoid?)

I love making my readers paranoid ... and it's no accident that members of the Explorer Corps resemble each other in many respects. Radiant reveals that nobody really knows how the Explorer Corps got started, or how it took its present form. I don't want to give away too much more than that. Suffice it to say, I enjoy writing all these books in the first person, where narrators like Festina believe they're telling the reader the Absolute Truth About Explorers ... and they're wrong, wrong, wrong.

In Trapped, about one in a thousand Earthers have psychic powers. If you had your druthers (and were sure nobody wanted to enslave you), what power would you like?

The best power in Trapped is the one displayed by the boy Sebastian—basically the entire planet is your friend and wants to help you out by doing whatever it takes. Since that's a bit too general for a question like this, I'd say that I have a soft spot in my heart for the ability to fly; it's one of those fundamental human fantasies with a lot of mythical power.

Of course, being able to fly is simplistic compared to other more-than-human powers. When you asked that question, I started thinking about superheroes from comics ... and I'm taken with the idea of being Flash, Green Lantern, or the Atom from the old Justice League. (Being Superman would also be nice, but it feels like cheating.)

Did you take fencing lessons while researching for Trapped? Do you now have a new hobby?

I did a bit of fencing in university—enough to know I wasn't going to be Zorro after only three hours of training. I soon headed in other directions, but it's nice to have a tiny bit of experience when I want to write about sword-stuff. (Of course, I take Kung Fu now, which also helps writing fight scenes. I'm pleased that Trapped finally gave me the chance to write some real martial arts.)

Did you take one of the guided tours of the Sir Adam Beck Niagara Generating Station No. 2 [at Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada] when you were researching for Trapped? What cool things about the station did you leave out of the book, as you had to leave out the witch-catching gate at Death Hotel?

I did take a tour of Sir Adam Beck many, many years ago. That certainly influenced the power-plant sections of Trapped, but I haven't been back recently to refresh my memory. Instead, I just referred to pictures in reference books ... and from sheer perversity, I decided I liked the ambience of the plant circa 1930 rather than changes they've made since then, so that's what I put in the book. I think the 1930s style fits better with the sense that by 2457, the plant is an aged monstrosity where all the equipment is patched together with spit and binder twine...