I love sci-fi, and read it as often as I can, but when I interview authors like Kathleen Ann Goonan, I’m reminded that I’ve barely scratched the surface of this genre and its authors. Kathleen is an award-winning writer, who was pretty much writing about things like nanotech before there was such a thing as nanotech — I saw that quote in an io9 interview she did, and it immediately got me hooked. Read on to learn more about Kathleen’s writing and her influences.
You’ve said that your father’s influence led you to sci-fi – is there any book or authors that sticks out in your mind that shaped your interest in sci-fi as well?
Ursula Le Guin, whose Wizard of Earthsea novels I began reading as soon as they came out. They led me to her SF. In the early seventies, two long SF world-books came out—Le Guin’s THE DISPOSESSED, Joan Vinge’s THE SNOW QUEEN. Everyone was reading them. I loved long novels that I could spend some time in—CATCH-22, V, EXODUS, even HAWAII. I read more fantasy than SF, and many writers straddled the boundaries–Elizabeth Lynn, for instance. The Ballantine reprint fantasy books that Lin Carter curated, which included novels by George MacDonald, Hope Mirlees, Lord Dunsany, and many others, drew me ever more strongly to fantasy, which is basically what I studied in college—ancient English literature, Surrealism—anything but mimetic fiction. When HOPSCOTCH was published by Pantheon in the 1960’s, it became my favourite novel. Though SF by men—any and all SF novels and short story collections available in paperback at that time was part of the milieu of books in our house–I was rarely enticed by these books when I was a teenager. They were full of (very strange) grown men, and I could not identify with them, just as I could not identify with Updike’s Rabbit when I tried to read those novels. Of course, my father bought SF written by women, too—it’s just that there was not much of it.
When I began writing SF, it was a surprise to me. I had thought I would write fantasy, and my trunk novel, written in 1984, is a blend of SF and fantasy—specifically, it is about the monumental shift from religious/philosophical/fantastic explanations of phenomenon to empirical observation that shapes our present. Probably, at that point, I left fantasy, which had infused my life, behind. My next challenge was to learn the history and basics of science.
I do remember thinking, when I read INFINITY’S WEB by Sheila Finch in the 1980’s, that here was a marvellous SF novel written by a woman, and it was something that I would like to write as well.
In reading some interviews about your writing and your influences, it also seemed that your father and his experiences played an important part in shaping you as a writer – would that be correct to say? How so?
My father’s influence was that he encouraged me to become an omnivorous reader, like himself, by example. He constantly (but gently) corrected our English. I do not, alas, know nearly as many words as he knows. He always did the most difficult crosswords and acrostics, leaving the easy ones at the front of the magazines for us, and is a formidable Scrabble player. When I was accepted at a design/art program at Virginia Commonwealth University, he strongly suggested that pursue my interest in literature and writing. And so I did. I still paint, but I think that he was right to guide me in that direction.
My mother was an equally strong influence. When I was in high school and badly wanted to get a job (mainly so I could buy one of the $100 MG’s in the classified ads that I circled and put under my father’s nose, at which he nodded, placed to one side, and continued reading), she basically forbade me to work. She said, “You love to read, and this is your time to read. You don’t know what will happen later in your life—you may never have long stretches of time in which to read again.” And so, I did read. I continued to stagger out of the library with as many books as I could carry, read them all in a week, and return for more, as I had since I was old enough to get a library card. When I graduated high school, my mother found me a job in a bookstore. I didn’t really make any money—I spent it all in the bookstore—but it was a lovely and perfect job for me.
My father’s specific experience was his participation in the creation of IN WAR TIMES, my sixth novel and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner. I had listened to his war stories my entire life, and they were not the usual war stories about battle. He was in ordnance, having finished three years of Chemical Engineering at the University of Dayton, when he joined the Army, and learned how to troubleshoot what was then top-secret short-wave radar before being sent to England and then Germany. I based a fictional character, Sam Dance, on my father, but he is fictional—for instance, my father did not have a brother who died at Pearl Harbor.
I based Bette, an OSS agent whom Sam eventually marries, on my mother. My mother was an adventurous woman. She flew a small plane for the Civil Air Patrol during WWII, worked at Dow Chemical until the late 1940’s, travelled extensively, and was not focused on getting married at all until she met my father. They were both twenty-nine when they married, six months after they met.
As a reader and writer, are there any events in sci-fi that you’ve enjoyed the most, ie the publication of a book, an interview you read, something along those lines that made you excited for the genre?
Of course, having one’s own novel, published, to starred reviews, is always exciting.
I was offered a teaching job at Georgia Tech in 2010 by Lisa Yaszek, past president of the Science Fiction Research Association and recipient of the Pilgrim Award for her scholarly work and contributions to the field. I propose the classes I teach, which is lovely. Teaching the SF short story and the SF novel, two classes I chose to teach, definitely renewed my interest in science fiction, which was exciting.
Who are the authors you do read and why? 
Oh, my. I mostly read books by scientists writing about their field, books like IN SEARCH OF MEMORY by Eric Kandel, and biographies—of anyone, as long as they are well-written. I guess I like to explore what makes people extraordinary. I am very much interested in neuroscience, in early childhood development, and in those with unusual brains, because they show some of the possibilities of being human that are just beginning to be explored.
Some of my favourite contemporary writers are Karen Joy Fowler, for her wit and consummate subtlety, and because she is interested in many of the same issues and ideas that interest me; Greg Egan, for the way he can take one out on a philosophical limb with breathtaking ease; and Kim Stanley Robinson, for the depth with which he constructs pasts and futures.
Can you tell us about the influences of jazz on your writing? Who introduced you to jazz and what captured your imagination about it to use it in your writing?
I was listening to jazz before I was born. It was the household music. When I was little, my dad would, for instance, ask what I thought was playing, then he would tell me it was “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” but stretched and abstracted by a jazz viewpoint. I think that it became my subconscious metaphor for life: we have the power to interpret time, phenomenon, relationships, etc., and use them in art by changing the tonal values, the timing, while the power of reality remains and resonates through the piece. Mastery is the underpinning to improvisation, and the conversation that is literature is a constant renewal of voice, theme, and heightening of experience into and through art.
When you look around at the fast-paced progress of technology, what does your imagination see – something hopeful or something dangerous?
Nothing is black and white. I am by nature a hopeful person, and I think that most of us are. It is difficult to think of the technology of the telephone as dangerous. It is neutral. If telephonic communication is used to plot an event that results in loss or death, we do not blame the telephone. We blame the people. We are dangerous, not technology.
What do the sci-fi stories out now reflect about our society, do you think? Are they hopeful?
When I first started writing sf, I realized that hopefulness, if not an outright Happy Ending, is embedded in the genre, at least in what is written now. I think that we live in a generally happy and hopeful era, particularly when compared to the 1940’s and then the 1950’s, in the wake of Hiroshima. A lot of SF that is not at all hopeful was written at that time. SF does not really, or does not often, deeply explore the nuances of human relationships. SF explores the nuances of our relationship with our technologies.
You’ve written short stories as well – is your writing process any different between short stories and novels? For instance, do you approach them differently in terms of research and writing? How so?
More often than not, I spend as much time doing research for a story (lately, they have all been about 12,000 words) as I do a novel. The difference is that I will live and breathe a novel for several years. I become many different people—the characters—and while I am writing one character I must be aware of what that character does nor does not know. The characters must be individuals; they cannot bleed into one another. In both forms, writing is an emergent exercise for me. I dance on the edge of constant discovery. Even if what I write is wrong and does not fit, it is not a waste of time—it shows me what the truth is.
Have you changed as a writer? How so?
This is something of which I cannot be sure. Only observers could say if and how I may have changed. I hope that I have changed, though! I suppose that I have more confidence that when I begin something I will be able to finish it. I suppose I have more control over my work, and waste less time . . . some of the time. I could say that I write more quickly, but then next month I might begin a story that takes a year to finish. Each project has its own challenges, and that is what keeps writing interesting—one is always learning.
Will you stray into another genre at any point, do you think? Or does sci-fi have your heart and imagination?
SF casts a strangely wide net. It is difficult, in the present day, to write fiction in which the characters are not affected by science and technology. But those factors are often as invisible as air. Unless you are writing historical fiction, if might be said that you are writing science fiction. It’s all a matter of timing. I’ve just finished a story for Tor.com, and it has rockets in it. Yet it could easily be described as “having no science fictional elements.” In 1910, just using a rocket in a story would be science fictional.
I think that what has my heart is science and technology—the human elements that have changed the world, and that are changing us. That is where danger and hope and challenge all lie; that is what is most interesting about the present: where might we go, what might we be, in the future.
