by Karen Bennett

The following interview with SF author Spider Robinson, who lives on Bowen Island, British Columbia with his wife, Jeanne, was conducted via e-mail on October 25, 2008, and added to in January 2009.

Mystery and horror writer J.A. Konrath (Afraid, Whisky Sour, Bloody Mary, etc.) has urged his blog readers to set up and put the time into maintaining not only their own websites and blogs but "online billboards" on such sites as MySpace, Shelfari, Goodreads, Facebook and CrimeSpace: "Your MySpace page, your Shelfari profile, even your blog and website, are all billboards, pointing directly to links where your books can be purchased." This can be a lot of work, and if you're doing that kind of thing, you're not writing, as I've heard another author say. Comment?

That seems like exactly the sort of work publishers should be doing for us. I thought publicity and promotion were among their justifications for keeping most of the money.

It is just barely possible for me to write the damn books fast enough to keep the mortgage paid and food on the table. And it may NOT be possible by this time next year, or sooner. I wouldn't have time to flog my books too even if I wanted to (and I don't) or had any talent at it (and I don't). Hell, I barely have time to keep my cat's ears properly scratched—let alone Jeanne's back.

I keep my website reasonably updated, I offer a reasonable amount of blather in my monthly podcast, and I write the best books and record the best audiobooks I can. That seems like the best use of my time.

Judging by such of your work as Variable Star (Tor, 2007), you're not afraid of catching "romance" or "girl" cooties by putting romance into SF.

It's way too late to be afraid: I caught girl cooties as early as possible, and have resisted all attempts at treatment. I feel genuinely sorry for anyone, male or female, who has missed or resisted being infected with girl cooties. They HURT...

All the writers I grew up admiring most are romantics. I was fortunate enough to be raised by parents who were just daffy about each other. So was my wife. So was our daughter. So was her husband. And their kids will be, too. Love is one of the few things in life that, for me, turned out to be even better than it was cracked up to be.

You've expressed discontent with the way your non-fiction has been edited, saying on your site when you presented sample columns collected in The Crazy Years: Reflections of a Science Fiction Original (BenBella Books, 2004) that, "All of these columns were rewritten at least slightly by editors before appearing in the Globe and Mail; the versions that will appear in the book have also all been edited thoroughly by the BenBella Books staff.... This special posting is the only chance readers will ever get to see exactly what Spider wrote, with no intervening vision and no changes or cuts at all—a rare intimacy between reader and writer." Yet you've also said that David Hartwell edited your first novel, Telempath (1976), and that he taught you a lot. Are you in general happier with the way your fiction has come out, compared to your non-fiction?

I'd love to work with David again. Every step of the way he suggested ways to improve my story, things I'd never have thought of ... and he honestly didn't mind whether I used any of them or not. He never said, as one or two subsequent editors did, "I won't accept this book until you make the following changes." He helped me understand what I was trying to do, so I could do it better, then got out of my way. That's rare.

Where do your slew of awards (Hugos, Nebula, John W. Campbell, Heinlein, et al.) hang out at your house? Ellen Datlow has said her World Fantasy Awards are on her armoire, "greeting visitors with their gimlet eyes" (Datlow 2004). Your Earphones Award from AudioFile Magazine is hanging framed on a wall, but what about the others?

As I sit here at my desk I'm looking at my 1976 and 1983 Hugo Awards, sitting together atop the right speaker cabinet. On the other side of the window, on top of the left speaker, sits the first award I ever won, the 1974 John W. Campbell Memorial Award For Best New Writer. Beside it is NESFA's E.E. "Doc" Smith Award for Imaginative Fiction—a handy award. To evoke Doc's Lensmen, it incorporates a lens: a magnifying glass I find use for a dozen times a week.

Inside the house, a few dozen steps away, the matched set of Hugos and Nebulas that Jeanne and I were given for co-writing Stardance sit (romantically) side-by-side on top of a huge I-don-t-know-what-to-call-it in the living room that holds hundreds of vinyl record albums and audiocassettes, and machinery for getting music out of them. Elsewhere in the livingroom are bookshelves spilling over with hardcover books and dozens of framed photos of our families and other loved ones (Robert and Ginny Heinlein on the set of Destination Moon, John Varley and me backstage at the Hollywood Bowl with David Crosby, etc.). Tucked in among the photos are the 2008 Robert A. Heinlein Award plaque, the 2006 Sam Moskowitz Award, and a framed letter from First Lady Laura Bush inviting me to be her guest at the 2006 National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., where I dined in the Thomas Jefferson Building with her and her husband, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and (I swear I'm not making this up) Elmo of Sesame Street, along with George Pelecanos, Michael Connelly, Alexander McCall Smith, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Bob Woodward, and a few dozen of our fellow scribblers, including Jeanne ... who was also invited separately by Mrs. Bush to attend the Festival that same year; her own letter of invitation is displayed in her office. (Each of us got to invite a guest to join us for brunch in the East Wing of the White House; we picked our daughter Terri and my sister Mary.) Also displayed on Jeanne's bookshelves are Comic-Con's 2001 Inkpot Award, the Pat Terry Memorial Award for Humorous SF (another practical award: a silver-plated beer mug) ... and the best award of all: the original handwritten copy of our wedding vows.

In July 2007, you began weekly podcasts of hour-long readings and music, but a year later you decided you couldn't sustain that frequency as you were making only $88.23 (Canadian) a week, while a podcast takes one full working night, and sometimes two, to produce. Now you're doing one podcast a month and a lot more writing. Comments?

If there were even a lousy living in it, I would happily spend the rest of my days podcasting. It's sheer fun. But I'd be crazy to keep doing it. So ... I'm backsliding, a little anyway.

I'm starting a new mid-monthly podcast, to appear on the third Friday of each month, which will consist entirely of music, with as few words as possible. I'm simply drowning in superb music hardly anybody else has ever heard of, and I can't stand it. So once a month I'll fill an hour with some of the best jazz, folk, blues, R&B, classical, world, and progressive music I've been able to get permission or license to podcast. I posted the first such episode on October 15th.

You stopped podcasting chapters of Very Hard Choices, your most recent novel, when someone told you he didn't buy the book because it was available for free in your podcasts. Could you weigh in on the argument that "providing work as free Internet downloads will drive hard-copy book sales," which some authors (Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, John Scalzi and Charles Stross, among others) have advocated?

I find it fascinating that we're all still trying to find a way to justify getting what we want without paying for it, while our planetary economy is going into the dumper because evil greedy men in suits found ways to get what they wanted without paying for it.

I'm not saying I'm any different. I find it hard to resist visiting certain bit torrent sites where I know I could download 36 commercially released John McLaughlin albums in a single torrent for free in under an hour. Instead I try to stick to the sites like dimeadozen.org that are scrupulous about dealing only in live recordings, outtakes, rehearsals, radio broadcasts and other non-commercial unreleased stuff: music that's not just free but guilt-free.

But I have to admit that because I do that a lot, I have not actually bought many commercial CDs lately. Most of the music I've acquired in the last couple of years is stored in white paper sleeves, not plastic jewelboxes with art and liner notes. This can't be good news for living musicians. And the same thing is starting to happen to writers, as our audiobooks get posted to bit torrent sites.

If we all keep insisting on free content, we're going to be left with nothing but amateur work, and blogs about it.

Here’s the most exciting new idea I’ve heard in that direction, though:

Right now, if you go to see David Crosby and Graham Nash, on your way out you’ll be offered a chance to take the concert home with you—an authorized soundboard recording of that very performance—in the form of a little USB thumbdrive on a souvenir bracelet! At the end of the tour, all the performances will be made available for purchase in that form at crosbynash.com.

Isn’t that lovely? You get a momento of a magic evening, the equivalent of 2 standard CDs ... and they get to keep all the money. No suits in between you. The first new idea in music merchandising since the compact disc ... and it comes from two guys who’ve been at this for forty years. David and Graham, no shit—still kicking ass and taking names, sticking it to the suits.

May this idea go viral as quickly as possible.

And what a great example to start with, by the way: David and Graham have never sounded better than they do this tour, and I realize what a sweeping statement that is.

Michelle Sagara says, "I send a book to my editor when I hate every single word I have written.... There are authors who say, 'Don't send something out until you're happy with it.' If I did that I would never be published. It's never going to be perfect." As someone whose internal editor is always working overtime (so being in Camp #2 is preventing me from sending stuff out): What do you do?

I send it out once I've reached the end of the story and confirmed that there are enough pages to hold the covers apart. At that point I'm way too close to the book to have any idea if it's great or awful, and I don't care: I just want to (a) send it in so I can get paid, and (b) get some sleep.

But I have one tremendous secret weapon: Jeanne reads all my copy as I produce it. She spots blind alleys and missteps and contradictions and dull parts long before I would have, and often comes up with ideas I'd never have thought of. I'd give her a byline on every one of my books, if she'd take it.

You've said on several occasions that you no longer write short stories because you stopped getting short-story ideas. My inquiring mind wants to know: How do you stop getting ideas? Wear a tinfoil hat? Cover your eyes when reading?

I want to know too. But first I want to know how I started getting them in the first place.

All I can tell you is, the process of sustaining a book-length lie is SO friggin' complicated, constantly presents so many naggingly insoluble problems—especially after 35 years of using up all the easy ones—that it apparently requires whatever creative energy I have. If I get a great idea, it's always related to the current project, on which financial survival depends. I really really wish I could write great Analog stories for my friend Stan Schmidt the way I used to for Ben Bova. Maybe I just had more creative energy then.

Or I might start getting short story ideas again tomorrow. The whole process is a mystery to me.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has said that she is "often dumbfounded" by what readers discover in her books (Yarbro 2005), while Elizabeth Bear says, "Readers are amazing beasts. They persist in having opinions and agendas and perspectives that totally differ from my own" (Bear 2007). Would you care to expound on any "Say what?" moments you've had?

One of the hardest things for any artist is learning to keep a straight face while someone either praises or condemns your work for qualities you're pretty certain it does not possess.

I first noticed it backstage after Jeanne's dance concerts. People would come to the dressing room and tell her the parts they'd liked best about her choreography ... and nearly always Jeanne and I would be baffled and amused by what they thought they'd seen.

Doesn't matter; there are no wrong answers. All art is Rorschach art. The audience always does at least half the work. People who've paid money for their ticket or their book will try to find SOME reason why it was a shrewd move, and there really are no bad ones.

Do you listen to music while writing? (I can't; it's too distracting. If it's music with a regular tempo, part of my brain willy-nilly starts choreographing, and then the rest of it stops to pay attention... So I should listen to jazz, huh?)

I MUST have music playing in order to write ... and it helps a lot for it to be playing on speakers rather than headphones. I'm nocturnal, so having an office separate from the house these last 10 years has been a godsend for me.

With certain exceptions it's better for the music to be instrumental, with few or no lyrics. And as you say, it's good if the tempo varies unpredictably, as in much jazz, contemporary classical, all of Frank Zappa, progressive rock, and exotic stuff like Carnatic raga, Tuvan throat singing, Brazilian choro, etc. Beatles music is always good too.

But any music at all is better than none, for me. The music seems to occupy and placate the flighty part of my brain that would rather stop working... long enough for the responsible part to get a complicated thought finished. It compensates me for keeping my ass in the chair. That's my current theory, anyway.

The chapters in Very Hard Choices (2008) where Russell Walker is trying to cross between islands in the dark in various boats reminded me of Donald Westlake (in his Dortmunder series) and Farley Mowat (in The Boat Who Wouldn't Float; Little Brown & Co., 1970). It was hilarious—until Russell's right lung turns disobliging. Did you do much messing about in small boats as research?

None. Well, not in decades. My few experiences solo in small craft were as memorable as my first encounters with pneumothorax [which is what was wrong with Russell's lung, above]; I felt no need to re-experience either nightmare to describe it vividly.

For the record, nearly all the sailing lore in that book, and especially Russell's description of leaving the dock, came courtesy of my good friend and expert consultant Alex Morton, skipper of the 1976 Erickson 27 sloop Haiku. Alex's fiction and nonfiction appear regularly in magazines like Pacific Yachting, and I strongly hope that before too long some astute publisher will offer you an opportunity to read his [unpublished] novels The Genius Card and My Uncle Was a Shylock with Alzheimer's.

You're right, by the way: I definitely had Dortmunder in mind while writing that whole part of the book.

WHY are there no statues to Donald E. Westlake?

Feel free to decline to answer: Is there really a variety of pot called Kootenay Thunderfuck (mentioned in Very Hard Choices)?

Oh, absolutely. Even for B.C. pot it has unprecedented power, grandeur and glory. Several internationally noted authorities say flatly it is the best marijuana ever grown. I concur.

If it were legal to export it to sensible countries like Portugal or the Netherlands, or even to sell it freely across Canada, we’d very soon be in a position to bail out the American financial system AND fund public health care for them, out of petty cash.

In a January 2008 podcast [Spider on the Web #25], you praised The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor (Norton, 1997), while you loathed Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road (Knopf, 2006). Have you any titles to add to these categories of "the best and the most disappointing science fiction novels by non-SF writers" that you've read recently?

Jeanne and I are both rediscovering an old favourite lately: Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (Knopf, 1976). We both like her books generally, but there's something special about that one. The genre allows her to unleash her full power, I think. I hope she returns to it one day.

And I recently wrote an introduction for PS Publishing's reissue of one of my favorite books, Lawrence Block's Random Walk (Tor, 1988; PS Publishing, 2008). It's quite unlike anything else that remarkable writer has ever written, the closest he's ever come to genre SF, and I recommend it highly. As in Zabor's book, there are extended passages where he just closes his eyes and wails as hard and true and pure as Trane himself [jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane, 1926–67].

You've said, "There is a certain kind of writer, too common nowadays, who genuinely believes, deep down in his sick wrinkled little raisin of a heart, that happy endings are something that we just don't deserve—that the human race does not deserve to exist, that Man is so vile, God should send another flood as quickly as possible, before we maim Mother Gaia. I believe such writers should be allowed to work, and publish ... I believe nobody should ever be censored ... but I'll never understand why anyone READS them." Does Cormac McCarthy happen to be one of the authors you had in mind when you said this?

He is indeed. I was paid good money to read and review The Road ... and I EARNED that money. Why anyone else finished it, or even got halfway through, I can't imagine.

I have no problem with anyone deciding that life is a futile bitter joke. I've been clinically depressed myself. But I kept it out of my work, for God's sake. I didn't charge people money to listen to me prove their lives are meaningless. Trying to SPREAD clinical depression is about the most absurd undertaking I can imagine. And should be regarded the same way as trying to spread AIDS, or anthrax.

In his forgotten book On Moral Fiction (HarperCollins Canada/Basic Books, 1978), John Gardner argued that art should be a bonfire in the night, holding back the darkness. I'm with him. If you're not accelerating evolution, you're braking it.

Upcoming work?

At the moment I'm plotting out a trilogy of sequels to Variable Star—-set in the same ficton as that book, but without further input from Robert. (I invited him, but he and Ginny are off on a round-the-galaxy cruise.) Wish me luck...

I've also got a new Callahan's book in mind, Callahan's Return. But to my surprise, Tor Books isn't interested in publishing it, and nobody else would want to publish a single book from a Tor series, so I guess it won't get written. A shame; I really miss those characters.

However, I just [January 2009] got some great news: Tor has bought The Orphan Stars Trilogy, sequels to Variable Star, for six figures.

Any questions you wished you'd been asked, or has my persistence already rendered you in need of a restorative?

Only one: I wished you'd asked if Jeanne and I have any plans to become grandparents in 2009. Because it seems we do: Terri and her husband Heron are pregnant. If we were any happier, we'd explode.

Before I go, though, let me thank you for your questions. Every one was interesting.... EXTREMELY rare.

Notes

Links to three quotes (by Bear, Datlow and Yarbro) were not provided above because the interviews appeared in The Internet Review of Science Fiction, and the site may require a subscription:

• Bear, Elizabeth. "An Interview with Elizabeth Bear" by Lyda Morehouse, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, March 2007.
• Datlow, Ellen. "Ellen Datlow," an interview conducted by John Joseph Adams, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, October 2004.
• Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn. "A Visit with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro" by Christina Francine, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, June 2005.