obert Reed is a notable presence in American SF, prolific, stylish and exacting. A stalwart of the field since the late 1980s, he combines restless invention with a penetrating moral vision; his endlessly fertile imagination ranges across an infinity of universes, embracing everything from the intimate immediacy of personal experience to galactic empires and starships as big as worlds, interrogating the condition of humanity acutely all the while.
Early in his career, Reed published a rapid succession of colorful, well-received novels: The Leeshore (1987), The Hormone Jungle (1987), Black Milk (1989), Down the Bright Way (1991) and The Remarkables (1992). These were followed by a diptych, Beyond the Veil of Stars (1994) and Beneath the Gated Sky (1997), and the notably experimental An Exaltation of Larks (1995); an impressive collection, The Dragons of Springplace (1999), issued by Golden Gryphon Press, confirmed Reed's growing stature in short fiction. Indeed, although two major novels—Marrow (2000) and Sister Alice (2003)—have appeared in the last few years, it is as a writer at lesser lengths that Reed has become especially important: His short stories and novellas feature with extraordinary regularity in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's and Sci Fiction, and he is a fixture of Year's Best anthologies. An excellent Reed Web site, incorporating a comprehensive bibliography of his work, can be found at www.starbaseandromeda.com/reed.html.
I interviewed Robert Reed by e-mail in October 2003.
Your first big career breakthrough came when you won the Writers of the Future Gold Award in the mid-'80s. Prior to that, how did you first become interested in reading and writing SF? And what led to your entering the Writers of the Future contest?
Reed: I'm a relative latecomer to science fiction. As a boy, I read and enjoyed the occasional novel. But my burning interest didn't emerge until I was in my late teens, and then it came in a decidedly ass-backwards way. I had always loved to read about science: in particular, astronomy, biology and paleontology. In high school, when I was bored in class or sitting in study hall, I'd use simple math and my mind's eye to build alien worlds. Writing science fiction seemed like a natural career move, and like many novice writers I believed that I was singularly qualified. Surely, it wouldn't take me long to make my first sale. And it didn't take long at all, if you happen to measure these things in geologic time.
SF has never been the majority of my reading, but through college and for the next several years it supplied more than half of my fiction calories. And I usually wrote every day, either a little or a lot. As a junior in college, I began getting the occasional reply to my submissions. Ben Bova sent me a nice letter. So did Damon Knight. I felt that I was getting close. But that following summer, tragedy struck. Or maybe a blessing. Either way, I suddenly learned how to read Faulkner. I can remember the moment, the place and the exact story—"A Justice"—and afterwards I realized just how complicated and wondrous good stories can and should be.
I wrote for another six years, remaking myself as a writer every few days. And I read everything, too. In the SF orbit, and in the cosmos beyond. The editors stopped writing back, and once or twice I said, "F--k it" and gave up. But I always went back to my stories. I wrote one called "Mudpuppies." I thought that it was the best thing that I'd ever done, and when it was rejected out of hand, I got pissed. I knew about the Writers of the Future Contest, and I was very much impressed by the judges. So I retyped the manuscript in the contest format, and the rest, as they say, is an obscure footnote in someone's history book of very minor events.
What authors would you acknowledge as your important influences and role models, both within and outside SF?
Reed: In no particular order: Gene Wolfe, James Tiptree Jr., Ursula Le Guin, Clarke, and Asimov, and Robert Silverberg. Plus the contributors to those grand old collections that showcased SF written before the Nebula Awards, and also the Terry Carr annual bests. In Silverberg, I saw someone who possessed the career that I wanted. He was prolific. He seemed to make a comfortable living through writing. One of his stories always seemed to appear in Carr's best-of books, with half a dozen other titles listed as honorable mentions. (I think I can now claim that odd niche for myself, judging by Gardner Dozois' Year's Best. And there are years when I make enough money to live on, too.)
Outside of SF, I've read a fair amount of Twain, most everything by Hemingway and Faulkner, and Joseph Conrad, too. A buddy at my old factory job introduced me to Jerzy Kosinski, who was a wonderful, almost-SF writer. (Or his assistants were wonderful; I've heard rumors that he was not quite the author.) I ate Graham Greene so quickly that I can't separate his novels from one another. My relationship with Updike has been up and down. Madame Bovary, by Flaubert, was wonderful. And Nabokov has astonished me, now and again.
Despite all of that name-dropping, I feel grossly under-read in both SF and mainstream literature.
You have a B.S. in biology, and worked as a lab technician for a number of years. How extensively would you say this background has shaped your SF, in subject matter and philosophical outlook? You have that aforementioned gift for depicting convincing alien ecologies ...
Reed: Actually, my lab-tech career spans a period of months, not years. Factory work is what paid my bills in my early career. In fact, the factory let me work part-time, writing and going back to school either in the mornings or afternoons. I took a few graduate courses in biology, and my favorite class, probably in my scholastic life, was called Population Biology. The professor was a gung-ho chap with a curious, relentless mind. When I walked into his class, my knowledge of natural selection was limited to a string of memorized facts and loosely related ideas. He showed me an Evolution that never sleeps—a relentless scythe tirelessly cutting its way through every population, every lineage. Then, afterwards, on my own, I read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. With the help of those two apes, I created a rugged little toolbox that I can apply to my world-building business.
My philosophy? I focused on ecology in college, but that takes me only so far. I try to be a reasonably good citizen of the world, yet I have few illusions. I live in a small house and drive medium-mileage cars. My wife and I don't travel far or often. My meat intake is way down from my youthful days. But despite my well-meaning intentions, I consume more energy in a year than many Third-World villages require. I'm concerned about global warming, but then again, I also believe that the Earth is not a fixed, unchanging ball in space. We aren't past the ice ages, and the best evidence shows that the cold doesn't arrive slowly or in small steps. So maybe it's a good thing that we're burning the carcasses of other ages. I don't know.
I don't know.
That's my philosophy. I simply do not know, which gives me an enormous freedom ...
You were born in Omaha, and still live in Nebraska, in Lincoln, the state capital; you are certainly Nebraska's leading SF writer. Is your writing in some sense regional, a refraction of Nebraskan landscapes, attitudes, accents?
Reed: Early on, I learned that if I wrote about farms and farm life, editors on the East Coast would believe me. They assumed some deep personal knowledge on my part. Which is amusing, since I'm about as urban as you can get in this part of the world. That said, I must have been influenced by this home place of mine, but I'm about the last person to decide what the influences are.
On another note, barely related: There is a major fantasy writer [Terry Goodkind] who came from Omaha. In fact, judging by a recent article in the Omaha World-Herald, he and I attended the same high school. High schools mean a lot to Omaha natives. Old people meeting for the first time will ask each other, "Where did you graduate from?" Fifty years after the fact, but whatever the answer, there are implications and subtexts. As it happens, both the fantasy boy and I went to Benson, which is a blue-collar place. Nick Nolte went to Benson, and he belonged with us. Except there was some trouble, as I recall reading, and his old man moved Nick to Westside, so that he could still play football. By contrast, the Fondas—Peter and Jane—attended Central High. I know a big editor in SF who also walked those loftier hallways.
Where was I heading with this?
Oh, yeah. Fantasy boy. I guess that he and I drank out of the same water fountains and pissed in the same urinals, which seems a little bit ironic now. Don't you think?
I live in Lincoln, and I have lived here, with one brief exception, since college. Lincoln is a smaller, very different place from Omaha. Imagine the largest small town in the world. Two hundred thousand neighbors, and two universities, and no freeway inside the city's boundaries. I like it fine.
You're an enthusiastic long-distance runner; John Clute once remarked that your writing seems consistently to reflect the psychology of long-distance running, a certain persistence, resilience and solitariness appearing prominently in the makeup of your characters. Is this a conscious aspect of your technique and theme?
Reed: No, it is not conscious. Or wasn't. But now I'm feeling a little self-conscious.
On a related note: John Clute also suggested that I wrote while running. Isn't that the cliche? The solitary athlete pounding out the miles, his head filling itself with any distracting thing? But the reality is that I almost never write while running, and until recently, running was my most reliable social event. Three or four days a week, I ran with others. Sometimes, six days a week. Unfortunately, my old groups have gotten older and frailer, and most of my workouts are now done alone. Just like they were when I started this sport, which is a little sad.
Slow running with others means endless conversation. Hard running is hard, and there's not much brain left to use on plot troubles or character voices. And very hard running ... well, I had this stretch of races some years ago. I wanted to break 30 minutes in a five-miler. There's a woman in town who I've known for years—she manages the Lincoln Running Company. She runs a little faster than me, usually. I would hang close to her in the races, and if we were only two or three miles into the race, and if I couldn't remember Ann's last name, then I knew that I was pushing too hard and should drop back.
Coming now to your career as a novelist: your first few novels appeared in quite rapid succession in the late '80s and early '90s, and drew a lot of praise, including comparisons with William Gibson. At that stage, were you following a cyberpunk agenda? Or were you—are you—simply an SF writer, without affiliation, except perhaps to hard SF?
Reed: I don't know if I am simply anything, but I have never felt drawn up into any sub-field or splinter genre. Not a good strategy for a career, I think. The water between waves can go unnoticed. But then again, I don't really feel as if anyone's agenda has given me good enough reasons to join in.
A striking characteristic of your early career is your refusal—reminiscent of Bruce Sterling and Michael Swanwick—to write novels with any sort of common or connected background. No series; each book is quite different from the others in tone, topic and the details of the future described; not a sequel in sight. Why was this? And did this resolute originality affect sales of your books negatively in the series-dominated SF market, or restrict your profile within the SF community?
Reed: I'm sure that I hurt my career, as measured in sales and perceived importance. I'm also sure that rewriting my first novel 10 times would have ground me to dust, or at least made me lazy and cynical.
In the runner's code, this is a long race. You can't win the marathon in the first miles, but you can lose it easily enough. I wrote what interested me, and I tried to become better as a writer. Not everything that I wrote sold—a point that should be made with every writer's career. What the public sees is always just a fraction of the author's total output. For instance: I cobbled together the start to a sequel to my first novel, The Leeshore. But I changed publishers shortly after that, and a new publisher doesn't usually want to get the second book of a lukewarm series. Thus, Down the Bright Way. Which was rather different from anything else that I'd written, and it's probably one of my best books. And then I went into the second book on the contract right away, and since I was tired of Bright Way's universe, I invented The Remarkables.
You did eventually write an interlinked duo of novels: Beyond the Veil of Stars and Beneath the Gated Sky. Was this a deliberate switch to the writing of series, or an unusual case of a story happening to demand continuation?
Reed: Yes, and yes.
Veil of Stars did well, and I don't believe that my next novel, An Exaltation of Larks, was quite the same success. I had written just a few pages of Gated Sky when I met with my editor, Jim Frenkel. It was a power dinner. His powerful staff was with him. All guys, and Jim wanted something about my next novel, and thinking quickly on my butt, like a good writer does, I offered up Porsche Neal. A tall, strong and beautiful woman at the center of another world-spanning story ... well, that piqued the guys' interest, sure enough.
If Gated Sky had done better, I might have gone back to that universe. But I felt as if I'd written myself into a bit of a corner, and I needed some new vision that would let me figure everything out ... or at least take me far enough that I could better understand what was happening. My novel career moved along in the meantime, and my only return to that universe went relatively unnoticed: a novella called "Apothecary Blue," published in Science Fiction Age. Shortly after that, the magazine folded. Cause and effect? Perhaps not.
In recent years in particular, your focus has shifted to short fiction (although you've published short stories in some quantity throughout your career). Why this change? Even your last two novels, Marrow and Sister Alice, are in the nature of "fix-ups," novels assembled from previously published novellas ...
Reed: Again, writers write, and editors buy, and the filters between the producer and his worshipful public are many and tireless. I wrote three or four million stories that were rejected. Some of my best stories during these last 12 years were those same efforts, reworked and re-energized. My novel career has always been just good enough. Just good enough means that publishers buy my work eventually, and I have enough free time to write a dozen stories every year, give or take.
About Marrow: I never intended to write the novel, but Jim Frenkel recognized that the novella had real possibilities for expansion. I'm extremely thankful that he gave me the opportunity. The ugly little truth is that I have no great love for the shorter work—the one that was nominated for a Hugo. I thought it had too much pressed into too little space. I'm writing fiction here, not manufacturing black holes. The final result is something that I enjoyed writing, and finally, here is a universe that I can return to with great regularity.
Sister Alice is an entirely different universe. That confuses some, I suppose. But Alice Chamberlain was born into a Milky Way with far fewer species than Marrow's galaxy holds. War and carnage are more common, at least for now. From among my various inventions—the faces and names and voices that I have used over the years—Alice is probably my favorite. Today, at least. I wrote the first novella, but of course the story wasn't done. I wrote "Brother Perfect" and prayed that Gardner would buy it. Which he did. The other three works came faster if not easier, and by then, I had pretty well set my mind on doing a full novel. What seems like a conspiracy—two fix-ups in a row—is mostly just a string of coincidences.
As for things not sold: in the last few years, I have written parts or all of several novels that remain homeless. One of them is a running novel, and, I'd like to believe, it is the finest running novel ever written. (The competition is slender, at best.) My agent and I have tried to sell Dead Man's Run, but it isn't an easy property. In theory, it is a murder mystery. There is a slight horror element—everyone is haunted by a dead runner—but generally, it is an odd and compressed tale. A slipstream story, I suppose. And very much a stand-alone property. I don't have a plucky detective who's going to show up in another thousand adventures, and while the editors basically like my language and the story, it isn't like anything else out there. They don't know how to predict its sales. Besides, my characters strike some of the editors as being rather unlikable—which can be a death knell in our current world. Nonetheless, I think Dead Man is some of my best work, and I intend to see it published somehow, someday ...
(Tease: A group of runners leave the downtown YMCA one Saturday morning, and they come upon another runner who has spent the last few months in jail. He was held for the murder of a friend of theirs, but there was insufficient evidence to hold him any longer. So one of the runners in the group says, "Hey, let's follow him. Maybe we can run a confession out of the prick.")
Of course, you're now probably the most prolific author of first-rate short fiction in the SF/fantasy field. Even given the amount of free time you've mentioned, how do you sustain such a tremendous output while producing such consistently fine work?
Reed: I live in a quiet city, on a quiet street, and there aren't many distractions, besides my need for money to pay the bills. Also, I've been at this for a very long while, and much of the writing process is deeply wired now. I have patterns that I follow—write the first page or two of a story, then put it aside for a few weeks—and once I find a voice and direction, the tale seems to unfold before me. Ordinary reading is so boring, thin and tepid, compared to what I do five mornings every week.
In your recent short fiction, two concerns seem to predominate. One is the possibility of an infinity of parallel worlds, and the disturbing existential dilemmas this scenario poses: There's the meaninglessness of individual choice in "Like Minds," the panorama of political outcomes implied in "Hexagons." Why does this set of issues fascinate you so?
Reed: I'm not a qualified voice in High Physics. Even on my best day, which was a sunny Tuesday some five years ago, I couldn't handle the mathematics. But from what I read in the journals, about quantum mechanics and the like, it seems as if the Many-Worlds universe might well be real and true. In most of science fiction, the ramifications are kept minimal—it is a convenient excuse for an alternate history or a tidy parallel world. But the concepts are enormous, embracing a far larger realm than a few thousand, or even a few trillion, what-ifs. Taken to its logical ends, there is no end to Creation, and none of us ever dies, and yet none of us can feel that Eternity, and each of us is permanently trapped in our own little sliver of the Infinite.
At Torcon, I was speaking to a fellow writer. She likes my work, I guess, but she admitted that it was not the happiest of stuff. "When do you read me?" I asked. "At night," she admitted. "Well, there's your mistake. I write in the morning. I'm happy enough to endure it then. And that's probably when you should read me."
The other concern identifiable in your current short stories is the implications of cosmological theory: our place in the cosmic scheme of things, the Fermi Paradox (if aliens are out there, why can't we see or hear them?), etc. In contemplating these great questions, do you find cause for hope (which would please your colleague at Torcon!), or despair?
Reed: A few years back, I wrote three stories at the same time. (I always write stories in groups, ranging from two to as many as seven.) All three stories clung to the Fermi Paradox. One was "Coelacanths," which proposed a future where the true powers of technology and intelligence have been released, and humans are reduced, or enlarged, to fill a multitude of new niches. In this universe, we cannot find aliens in the cosmos because intelligence will always explode into these peculiar and unexpected directions/dimensions, remaining utterly unknowable to little us. In another story, "Oracles," I described a universe where life is common and, once observed, other life-forms lend humanity all kinds of wonders. Handling that influx of high technology brings a crisis, and a science-fiction writer might help steer the world on a safe course. The third story, "Lying to Dogs," takes to heart certain grim possibilities. Intelligent life is exceptionally scarce. We're almost certainly alone in our galaxy, and perhaps for tens of millions of light-years on all sides. And the universe is a very fragile realm, with the Creation event only temporarily stopped, subject to a devastating re-emergence.
Which story do I personally believe? All of them, of course.
If pressed, I would say that life is common, that intelligence is common, and that judging by what I have read about our galaxy and the locations of metal-rich worlds, there can be a multitude of thinking entities in our sky today. Why don't we see them? Because we aren't all that smart ourselves, and probably never will be. Like in "Coelacanths," the end results—if "end" is the right word—will lead to options and wonders that don't require simple metal-and-rock worlds circling ordinary suns. Like in "Oracles", I tend to think that if we ever find alien signals—from species a few days more advanced than us—the event will mirror our recent discoveries of distant alien worlds. One alien signal during the first year, and three next year. And as we learn where and how to look, we'll reach a point where we spy 20 fresh signals every day. But as "Dogs" claims, I do think the aliens are very far away. Too far to fly towards, at least.
I have to admit that our genre makes it seem awfully cheap—not easy, but cheap—to stride from sun to sun. It's something that I'm guilty of, the same as many SF writers. Fast starships would need to spend so much energy and capital. But slow expansion from each far-flung sun, growing like vines among the comets and sunless worlds—that seems more likely to me. I can envision a galaxy rich with species, older than us and Coelacanth-strange, all broadcasting to their neighbors through cheap, narrow transmissions. In fact, I'm confident enough in that cosmopolitan image to place a $20 or $25 wager on it.
Cosmic immensities and huge gulfs of time feature in a lot of your mature work. In your extraordinary novel An Exaltation of Larks, those grand vistas are fully evident, yet compressed to the scale of individual experience in a small American college. How difficult was it thus to reconcile the vast and the tiny, to squeeze the universe into chamber-opera format?
Reed: Unlike almost every other novel, I wrote Larks for myself, meaning that it was essentially done when I first showed it to an editor.
How difficult was it? Surprisingly, I don't remember the writing being all that tough. A dozen 400-meter intervals with half-a-lap between for rest ... now, that's hard work ...
And I'm glad that you like it. But I should add that Larks didn't sell anywhere overseas, and it has passed into a kind of nonexistence of its own over the last five or six years.
Still on the topic of cosmic magnitude: your novel Marrow and its associated stories are set on an ancient planet-sized spaceship journeying the galaxy, its crew and passengers a bewildering array of sentient species. How did you come to imagine this colossal vessel, one of the great artifacts of SF?
Reed: The Great Ship has been built slowly and without great care.
I started with "The Remoras" (1994), for which I got my first cover art in F&SF. What I like best about that story is that I always knew how it would end. Quee Lee would discover the truth about her husband, and kick his sorry ass out the door. But when I got to the end, Quee Lee proved to be made of more forgiving stuff than me. She refused to give up on Perri, for which I have been eternally grateful.
At first, the Great Ship was a useful scene but not much more. In "Aeon's Child" (1995), I envisioned a tough-as-nails captain named Pamir and a weird pair of aliens who happened to be Gaians. In the process of writing it, the Ship became more real in my head. I began to think about its purpose and its beginnings, which led naturally to wondering about any secret cargo, and where would it be hidden, which led eventually to a minor character in "Child" named Washen, and a place called "Marrow." And that led to Marrow. And "Night of Time" (2003), in the Golden Gryphon Silver Anniversary Anthology. And in the near future, from F&SF, "River of the Queen." And I hope for a chapbook from Golden Gryphon wrapped around this odd little woman named "Mere." (On some days, Mere beats Alice Chamberlain as my favorite invention.)
A sequel to Marrow is on the cards. What direction is the saga taking now?
Reed: The sequel is mostly finished, turned in, and I'm quite happy with it. For now, the working title is The Sword of Creation. It takes place in the centuries after Marrow, with the same cast and a few other bodies. The Great Ship is off course, and bad things will happen, and good things too.
What to say?
Just this, I guess: the Ship is very big, and there's room still for a surprise or two.
Your latest novel, Sister Alice, is again big concept far-future SF; in it, you seem to be critiquing the privileges of elites. Is this indeed political allegory, multiplied to an ultimate power?
Reed: Frankly, I have nothing but admiration for those power-mad families. They held the galaxy at peace for 10 million years, against fantastic odds, and the end result will be more Creations and unexpected directions in the galaxy's development, evolution never having the time to sleep.
Sure, it's an allegory.
Or think of it this way: Some years ago, I realized what SF was to me. It is a vantage point from which one can see the past and present and future all running together into the same interesting pond. Frail gods would not be a tenth as interesting to me as frail, prideful people doing their awful best, using talents and tools that only make them seem godlike.
Back to your short fiction: you're writing a series of stories for F&SF about a Native American community isolated from the modern world, inhabitants of a sort of polder, a preserve of traditional ways. Do you intend to fashion these into a book? And what's it like writing in a magic realist mode in between your straight SF?
Reed: A few years back, one of my aborted novels went to the trash heap. But then I dug up its carcass and stole the most useful pieces. Raven Dream is the result, and I find his voice interesting, and over time I hope his singular predicament becomes equally intriguing.
Is it magic realism? I can't say. The third story in the series belongs to Gordon [Van Gelder] now: "The Condor's Green-Eyed Child." I don't quite know when F&SF will publish it, and in a specific, ready-to-write way, I don't really know what happens next.
What else lies ahead for you? Many more short stories, for a certainty—perhaps a new collection?
Reed: I should be doing a collection for Golden Gryphon, and perhaps for other small presses in the near future. And I'm planning to write more stories, although I don't know what they are. My two main markets have enough product of mine to make me look very busy for the next year or two.
Robert Reed's fiction can be found on our sister site, SCI Fiction. Click here for "Birdy Girl," "The Children's Crusade," "Melodies Played upon Cold, Dark Worlds" and "Like, Need, Deserve."
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