eorge Zebrowski is the author of more than 70 short stories and almost 40 books, including the critically acclaimed novel Macrolife and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award-winning Brute Orbits. His short fiction collections include In the Distance, and Ahead in Time and Swift Thoughts, and will soon be joined by a new collection of horror stories, Black Pockets.
Zebrowski has also edited many collections. With Jack Dann, Zebrowski oversaw Faster Than Light, a collection of essays and stories concerning a theoretical innovation on par with the domestication of fire and the invention of the wheel—namely, star travel at superluminal velocities. With Gregory Benford, Zebrowski put together Sky Life, a collection devoted to the dramatic and technical possibilities of long-term human habitations in space. On his own, he has edited five volumes of original science fiction in the Synergy series, including the newly published Synergy SF: New Science Fiction.
George Zebrowski chatted with Science Fiction Weekly by e-mail recently, discussing the view from beneath the brim of his editor's hat.
This is the fifth volume of Synergy you have edited. As time has passed, have you noticed a difference in the way science fiction short stories are written, or the themes and subjects they examine?
Zebrowski: The difference in how SF short stories are written is to an uncomfortable degree determined by the workshop, career-path mentality. This brings high polish even to amateurish work, showy-looking printouts and less concern with individuality and genuine ideas, more with media-derived imagery (put there in the first place by print SF!) coming back at us. Subjects are more derived from other works than from the cutting edges of our knowledge. There is more looking backward and staying with the present and near future than with genuine possibility. Too much of life and character as we know it has crept into the field. Once this was a strength; now it threatens the characteristic quality of SF: thought and speculation, and a critical view of the present, past and future.
When you speak of "life and character as we know it," are you thinking about how the way we live our lives is invariably impacted by advances in technology? And do you see an essential correlation between how we live our lives and the way our characters as human beings are formed? (For example, does having hot water make us gentler to one another? Does the use of high-tech medicine give us more appreciation for life and allow us to value life more than we otherwise might?)
Zebrowski: What I mean by life and character creeping into the writing of SF is that characterization and descriptions of daily life today can overwhelm the speculative element in SF works, especially thought. An "info dump," namely, information, as well as thought and speculation about possibilities beyond daily experience, is too often presented as a defect in a work, and often ridiculed. Admiring contemporary fiction, say of the last century or so, does not mean that we have to be overwhelmed by its techniques. The speculative element must form the story and the behavior of the characters; as Sturgeon once said, an SF story is one that could not have happened without the speculative element. Contemporary fiction sometimes borrows SF elements, but their use is often tame; SF should not imitate contemporary fictional ways to the point where the speculation and thought becomes negligible.
What cutting-edge concepts seem likely to you, right now, to be up to the challenge of speculative writing? Nanotechnology? Alternative energy sources? Genetic engineering?
Zebrowski: Advances in every field will overlay human character as we have known it, in perhaps startling ways: in our attitudes toward long life and death. Alternative energy sources will perhaps sweep away the fossil families of coal, oil and gas—who seem to want to burn the last measures before buying into the new sources, but by then it may be too late to keep the political power they now misuse. Smarter managers will have to undo the harm done to our lives. Genetic engineering will come, with mistakes, surely; but people will demand the benefits. And here also the rearrangement of political power will threaten today's unproductive economic elites. Nano, alternative energy, genetic engineering, spacefaring—all threaten the power structures that now exist on the planet, in ways the holders of that power can't envision. This ignorance leads to fear and superstition about the future, and a fateful slowing of constructive changes.
How about the role of biotech in general in the science fiction of recent years? Well into the 20th century, lightning was the mystic natural force that could bring the dead back to life, as in Frankenstein, or grant special powers to the unsuspecting average joe. Then, with the advent of the nuclear age, it was atomic radiation that unleashed telepathic mutants and gigantic insects into the genre. Now it's biotech. Or has biotech already been overdone? Is there something still more mysterious working at the edges of speculative fiction?
Zebrowski: Biotech in SF has followed the critical path: hope and fear. Be critical, give warning, but also show constructive possibility. Failures, of course, make for more drama. But the utopian/dystopian pendulum swing of SF since Frankenstein was published is the way to go. It's only when the pendulum stops that we should worry about the health of the field.
When you contemplate possible worlds of the future, how do you imagine the people to come looking back on us? Will they be horrified and resentful at our orgy of self-indulgence and our scientific laziness? Will they laugh at us as uncomprehending, simpler life forms? How likely is it that our sins of waste and short-sightedness today are going to derail human history?
Zebrowski: The great fact is that we can derail human history; fatally, perhaps. Look at how we see the past: we are often horrified; we do laugh, also. Comedy, it has been said, is the true face of our kind; the ignorance of the fool rather than evil rules; and the powerful manage to destroy themselves each and every time. They wouldn't do so, you'd think, if they knew more. We may not make it, as a species. That is one possible future. And not only for our own sins against each other and the planet, but from sheer ignorance of what can so easily destroy us tomorrow. Only a spacefaring culture can say that it is not inviting suicide by ignoring the vulnerability of this world to blind chance. The debris of our solar system can abolish human history, and chances of this happening are as good as the chance of dying in a plane crash. Nothing, no amount of wealth spent, is worth risking a world's history. Yet with all the peril facing us on and off the planet, we are engaged in a human civil war that never stops. We fight battle after battle and fail to defeat ourselves.
You have edited other collections in the past—Skylife, with Gregory Benford, which was built around the theme of human habitations in space, and, with Jack Dann, a book of essays and stories on superluminal travel called Faster Than Light, and many more besides. You always bring a depth and breadth of knowledge to these projects that can only be called scholarly. Do you regard yourself as an academic authority on the field of speculative literature? Is it part of your mission to help speculative literature claim a greater measure of respect out in the "marketplace of ideas"?
Zebrowski: Terry Carr called me an authority in the field. But let's drop labels like scholarly. Either you know something about the history of SF or you don't. When you don't, you reinvent the wheel, both as editor and writer. A violinist should know the music written for his instrument, an actor examples of his craft, a swimmer the records set before him. Nothing could be more common sense. As for the marketplace of ideas, the better they are the fewer people seem interested. Disrupts them too much. Respect, as the comedic TV character Ali G says so poignantly. If you have not scholarship and critical thought, then how can you tell a good idea from a crazy one? I meet people often who are disappointed that as an SF writer I don't believe in UFOs, reincarnation, alien abductions and so forth. After all, I have an open mind, don't I? As the author of Idiot Proof said recently, you have to know the difference between "probable truth and swirling nonsense." Besides, knowing is fun and adds infinitely to enjoyment, provocation and thought.
Sure, that's all true, but aside from the history of science fiction, you think a lot about what the genre is meant to accomplish. You have said in the past that science fiction offers us a way to prepare our minds for possible futures—a way to rehearse for the problems and opportunities that might arise. But there are certain parts of our recent history that could not have been predicted simply by projecting what had already happened into a future world with new variables to account for. Is that where vision comes into the equation of writing and imagining speculative stories?
Zebrowski: So-called vision in penetrating unpredictable futures is only the synergy of gathering a vast amount of data in your mind and then seeing what it suggests. Better than rehearsing futures is the idea of taking all that inductive enumeration of what we know and actually shaping our future. It already casts its shadow back into our present, in countless ways. Where we don't know enough, we should use our very ignorance as a map—by saying where there are blank spots, surrounding those blank spots with what we do know, and squeezing the blank areas to become smaller. Visions come when we have enriched our database to the point where, as SF writers, things begin to happen by themselves, surprising us. Enriching the database means a lot of reading, watching, listening, living, as we muse. SF's database is fast becoming archaic; there is more SF these days in the non-fiction science-writing arena than in SF. Of course, many science writers can think but can't write fiction, much less literature (which is all we mean by serious, investigating fiction). Robert A. Heinlein once commented that no one would do all the preparatory work needed just to be an SF writer. He was right. Few do so. I say, do so. And more. As a fiction writer, offer, don't cater; lead, don't follow. And if that impoverishes the artist, so be it. But get the work done, even if you have to scribble it down in pencil in a notebook. You always have a choice. It's happened before.
That a critical literature of such great possibilities as SF should be mostly commercial entertainment, existing not for itself but for other purposes, is astonishing, leading me to ask its writers and editors, "What are we part of?"
In the introduction to Synergy SF, you pose a profound question—you ask, "What is science fiction for?" Do you believe the stories and the essay in Synergy SF begin to address that question?
Zebrowski: Yes, I tried to pick them for illumination, provocation to thought, to ambush the reader through that great rational method of humor, for the shaping of organized insight through good prose, poetry and essay (also a literary form!). SF is for widening our sensibility to what may be possible. It says that the world we have known can be more than it's ever been.
Do you mean in terms of prosperity—as when I have heard you talk about the need to create an "economy of plenty"? Or are you thinking more of the capacity for human invention and conception: that our dreams and our will to pursue them will grow up and expand?
Zebrowski: Invention and conception is what I mean; our dreams and our wills may become stronger with a more secure world, or we may go to sleep, little understanding who and what we are. Imagine the will of an insurgent turned toward constructive ends, economies free of the lust for weapons and military control. We were adapted to survive, and that old program may well destroy us, violently or through a false sense of security, unless we enter our nature-given vitality in another kind of game.
In Synergy SF, you include more than short stories—there are two poems, two interviews and an essay examining the reasons for the mass hysteria that the 1938 Orson Welles broadcast of the War of the Worlds radio drama provoked in New Jersey. I don't think I've seen this sort of mix before in an anthology. What was your thinking behind putting Synergy SF together in this way?
Zebrowski: The other four volumes in the series also had this mix. The idea was to range across ideas and the history of the field in every way, across generational lines and times. You have no perspective without history, and can't tell the significance of new work without it. The history of SF is being lost as its visual imagery is pillaged by dramatic forms. I don't mind the influence of print on films and television work; but I would like to see more admission of sources. Nearly 200 years of SF has seen people of genius working in it, and they should not be forgotten.
As an editor, what are you looking for in stories to include in one of your anthologies? Do you, as Cele Goldsmith Lalli puts it in the interview with Barry N. Malzberg that Synergy SF includes, look only for a story to "captivate ... from beginning to end"?
Zebrowski: As a first reading, captivate all the way through is a good cry! But who is to be captivated? You can't captivate someone who has a small database; there's nothing in such a reader to resonate with. If you have to lay out everything for such a reader, from scratch, then you can only lose.
When you are editing a story, how much do you seek to guide an author's process? If you think a story could be made significantly better through minor changes, is your editorial approach to suggest, or even insist, on those changes?
Zebrowski: I usually invite authors who have seen the previous volumes. I never insist on changes. There are no deal-breakers. Authors usually show me their best because they know I trust them. Editors who have treated me in this way got more from me without a word of criticism, because I feared that they would take anything competent, so I had to give them my best. I pass this method along as a writer/editor (nearly all, with a few exceptions, great SF editors were writer/editors), and they can do things with their writers that no other kind of editor can do, given the implied relationship of commerce and dependency that "house" editors come saddled with.
Assembling an anthology means sorting through a vast amount of material, and most of that material is going to go unused even if it is of excellent quality. What did you leave out of Synergy SF that you might have wished could be included? What reasons were there for choosing some stories for inclusion and leaving others out?
Zebrowski: I tell you truly that I left nothing out. From the hundred or so serious submissions, few measured up to what I was looking for, and those are in the book!
As an author of several short-story collections of your own work, you have had to submit to (or at least work with) other editors. How easily does that come for you? Are editors, like doctors, the worst for their colleagues to have to work with?
Zebrowski: Not at all. And I tell you truly that no finished story of mine is ever orphaned these days. There are rejections, usually followed by acceptance at an even better paying publication, leaving me grateful for the previous, usually unperceptive rejection. This has now happened so often, with nearly all the stories in my two recent collections, award nominees and all. Database. Resonance. When one is small, so is the other. I think Nabokov and others have it right: The job description of writer should include editor; you should know what you're doing at the finish of a work. It may have been Wells who said that no desire is greater than to revise someone else's work. I add that this lust is most provoked by bad writing.
In previous interviews, you have expressed a passion for the integrity of speculative fiction and a horror for the state of the publishing industry as a whole—concerns that surface in your commentary throughout Synergy SF. Has the situation improved at all in recent years? Is there a way forward, given the market's tendency to homogenize literary voices and the fact that venerable sci-fi magazines routinely go out of business?
Zebrowski: Support the magazines; they are the last bastion of hope for SF, the place where writers can still strive and fail, and strive on. Subscribe, as a gift to the future. As for book publishing, it's mostly an attempt to fix horse races rather than let the race be run. Their hall of shame in treating notable works is now legendary. Yet the blacklists of commerce are not perfect: a dozen works get through every year and go out of print. Then amnesia sets in and new editors come in to be ruined, and publish good work for a short time.
As an editor of independent SF, I do what I can. For example, I took no money for my part in this volume; it all goes to the authors.
Among the interviews in Synergy SF was one you conducted with Ray Bradbury. What other legendary writers have you had the chance to converse with? How does the chance to engage a fellow writer in an interview give you fresh perspective into their work and into the task of writing?
Zebrowski: I've also interviewed Sir Arthur C. Clarke, at some length, Asimov in years past. My most ambitious question is to get at what they thought they were doing, how they felt when they started their climb of Everest. The answers have been good. In SF, new figures can often talk to the gods they grew up reading. A miracle.
If there are questions I am not asking that you wish I would, I will take your cue from when you interviewed Bradbury and invite you to ask me to ask them!
Zebrowski: You might ask me if it was worth it, with all the woe I know from others and my own. Yes. I'm still here, and always ready to tell the truth about the collaborators with the commercial occupation.
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