Locus, May 2013 Read online

  ‘‘I even had a movie credit of my own a couple of years ago. Disney Studios approached my agent about my novel On Stranger Tides right after the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie came out. They said, ‘If we make a series of Pirates of the Caribbean movies, we’d like to buy Powers’s book for the fourth installment.’ So for several years I hoped the first three movies would be successful enough to make them want to do a fourth! And of course they’ll option a book, but they don’t actually purchase it until like a week before they begin filming. They wait until the last minute, because they don’t know who might fall under a bus. Once they finally did purchase it, I wanted them to make the movie and release it and all… but at that point I kind of had what I came for. I didn’t have any contact with the script writers or anything, although we did get to go to watch a day of filming. Serena and I drove up to Universal Studios, and we got to meet Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Ian McShane, and Rob Marshall. I gave Johnny Depp a copy of the book, and we briefly discussed Hunter S. Thompson! Then Serena and I stepped back. Everyone was busy running around with tools and clipboards and lights. We backed away and got in our car and went off and had dinner somewhere.

  ‘‘The whole thing was very gratifying, even though the movie only used a few elements of my book. But it was all pirates and oceans and swords, and my name was right there in the credits. Then my book was re-released, and that was gratifying too. Now I keep hoping that other people in Hollywood will say, ‘Gee, Disney bought a Tim Powers book. They’re smart, maybe we should buy one, too.’ I’ve never been tempted to write screenplays myself. It’s a whole different form – like, if you’re good at painting, it doesn’t automatically follow that you’ll be good at sculpture. I’ve spent my whole life reading books and figuring out how they are put together, and I bet screenplay writers spend their time watching movies to see how they work. For movies I’ve always just been happy to be a receptive consumer.

  ‘‘I didn’t have any kind of proprietary feeling about the story. I know some writers get very upset and say, ‘Take my name off that! It isn’t an accurate reflection of my book!’ Well, of course it’s not – it’s a movie. Your book is fine. It’s over here on the shelf. Nobody has messed with your book. If someone told me, ‘Powers, we’re going to make a movie of Last Call, only we’re going to make it an animated musical with dancing hamsters,’ I would say, ‘Fine, sounds good to me, carry on.’

  ‘‘You could say, ‘But Powers, aren’t there any important political or social issues that you feel you address in your books?’ No. Don’t be ridiculous. I never have any points to make in a book or story beyond the events of the story itself. I never feel that I am making a statement about anything. If a writer consciously has some external point to make, the characters and events are too likely to become metaphors for something, and the story generally collapses entirely. Because suddenly they’re not real starships, they’re actually American imperialism or something. I want them to be real starships. There are exceptions to this, of course. 1984 is exactly what I’m saying I don’t approve of, but it’s a great book because Orwell made it so aggressively tangible, smellable, and palpable. The whole point of our stuff – our starships and time machines and ghosts – is disorientation and vertigo. You want the reader to be suddenly tilted into an unexpected direction, to have an experience they can’t possibly have in real life. When I read this stuff, I want to be walking through an Escher print or a Bosch landscape. I want that experience to be totally presented as real. I don’t want any hint that the writer is actually talking about the Catholic Church, or George Bush, or the size of soft-drink cups in New York.

  ‘‘In our field, people often say, ‘Science fiction is a way of sneaking up on the reader, and appearing to be talking about a remote civilization in some other galaxy, but really you’re talking about McCarthyism.’ As soon as I sense something like ‘What I actually mean is, McCarthyism is bad!’ I close the book. Enough themes emerge spontaneously from your subconscious without you needing to staple another one over the top. One of the things that always and still attracts me about genre fiction is its reliably frequent irrelevance. I like to think that my work builds on the irrelevance of my predecessors.’’

  –Tim Powers

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  Teresa Nielsen Hayden was born Teresa Nielsen on March 21, 1956 in Chamberlain SD, and grew up in Arizona. She became active in fandom in the mid 1970s,and with her husband Patrick co-edited the Hugo Award-nominated fanzine Izzard from 1982-87. They both served on the editorial board of The Little Magazine from 1985-88 and helped found The New York Review of Science Fiction in 1988. She has worked in many areas of book production, was managing editor at Tor, and has edited comics and literary criticism as well as novels. She has been a consulting editor for Tor since 1990. In 1984 and 1991 she was a Best Fan Writer Hugo Award nominee. Her Hugo Award-nominated collection Making Book (1994) gathers a range of essays on the practical side of publishing, and miscellaneous other subjects. She is also known as a forum moderator, and in November 2002 invented disemvowelling. From 2007 to 2009 she was the community manager at Boing Boing.

  Patrick Nielsen Hayden was born Patrick James Hayden on January 2, 1959 in Lansing MI. He became active in fandom in 1975 in Phoenix, Arizona, and published and contributed to many fanzines in the 1970s and ’80s. On moving to New York in 1984 he worked as an editorial assistant at the Literary Guild and alongside Teresa as an associate editor at reference publisher Chelsea House before joining Tor in the mid-1980s as an administrative editor. He is now a senior editor there and the editorial manager of Tor’s SF and fantasy line, and also edits short fiction for Tor.com. He edited all three volumes of the critically acclaimed Starlight original anthology series (1996, 1998, and 2001); the first volume won a World Fantasy Award. Other anthologies include Alternate Skiffy (1997, with Mike Resnick), New Skies (2003), New Magics (2004), and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens (2005, with Jane Yolen). He was nominated for Best Fan Writer Hugo Awards in 1985 and 1986, and for Best Professional Editor in 1997, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2013, winning twice. He also plays guitar and sings in the band Whisperado.

  Patrick and Teresa married in 1979, and took the joint last name Nielsen Hayden. They helped run the 1978 Worldcon and the 1999-2001 Minicons, and were Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund delegates at the U.K. for the 1985 Eastercon. They run the popular blog Making Light at and teach every year at the Viable Paradise writing workshop. They published Samuel R. Delany’s Wagner/Artaud: ‘‘A Play of 19th and 20th Century Critical Fiction (1988) through their Ansatz Press. In 2003 they were joint winners of a Skylark Award for their contributions to SF. They live in Brooklyn.

  •

  Teresa Nielsen Hayden: ‘‘The first time we met, it was in 8.5’’ x 11’’ twiltone mimeograph paper. I noticed that Patrick did really good colophons. He liked my adjectives.’’

  Patrick Nielsen Hayden: ‘‘We met in person about a year later. We were both quite young. A couple of years later we got involved. When we married, she was 23 and I was 20. I got into fandom when I was 16 in 1975 in Arizona, when I was still living at home with my family, doing a classic teenage throwing-myself-into-organized-science fiction-fandom-at-a-great-rate thing. I went to one meeting and by the end of it had gotten conned into taking over the editorship of the Phoenix club fanzine. I went to my first convention a month later, and my second convention was the first convention ever held in Phoenix, and I was one of the gophers, the general staff people. This is all against the backdrop of my family preparing to move to Toronto, so I very industriously got in contact with Toronto fans. We moved that summer. But I stayed in touch with the Phoenix crowd, and a year later Teresa got into that social group, so we sort of knew each other in print.’’

  TNH: ‘‘A couple of them had been students of my mother’s – she taught high school journalism and English. A bunch of them showed up one evening and
said, ‘Mrs. Nielsen, you have a color TV, and The Wizard of Oz is going to be on.’ That was back when you saw movies when you could. She said, ‘Oh, that’s important,’ and they all came in. I was going to Arizona State University and I’d seen posters for Leprecon One, but I hadn’t gotten up the courage to go. I’d noticed the name of the contact person, and he was one of the people in this group that came to see The Wizard of Oz. I was like, ‘You’re Tim Kyger? The Tim Kyger?’ So he phoned and asked me for a date two days later, and that’s how I wound up in fandom.’’

  PNH: ‘‘Both of us had been science fiction readers since our early/mid single digits.’’

  TNH: ‘‘You know how there’s a belief among writers that editors are failed writers? Almost all the SF editors I know said when they were little kids, ‘I wanna grow up to be an editor.’ We both did.’’

  PNH: ‘‘I remember knowing about the existence of science fiction fandom and the professional science fiction world when I was ten or eleven. I read the Hugo Winners anthologies, and they all have chatty introductions about that year’s Hugo banquet, and the funny things that Harlan Ellison did.’’

  TNH: ‘‘Same goes for the introductions to the Dangerous Visions anthologies. It’s like you’re pasting together all these tiny data bits, saying, ‘There’s something out there, I know it.’’’

  PNH: ‘‘I remember other sources of knowledge about this wonderful distant bohemian world of science fiction, like David Gerrold’s book about the making of Star Trek. I never actually liked Star Trek all that much but I found that book fascinating, it was full of all of these mythological things about LASFS and Bjo Trimble and stuff like that. Teresa and I knew each other from the sort-of-overlapping social circles of mostly youngish fans in Phoenix and Michigan and Toronto and so forth. We became a couple in the months running up to the 1978 Worldcon, which has been described in retrospect as the Children’s Crusade.’’

  TNH: ‘‘Patrick had been running the fan programming, and then Iguanacon had epic problems, including losing its head of programming.’’

  PNH: ‘‘He was told that he had to finish his doctoral dissertation by Labor Day, or forget it. That’s how I became the youngest division head in Worldcon history. I was 19 and ran the programming department. Our 22-year-old chair was Tim Kyger. We fired the previous chair after discovering we didn’t have a hotel contract, six months before the convention.’’

  TNH: ‘‘First Worldcon committee to ever fire its chair.’’

  PNH: ‘‘It was a chaotic mess. It was an incredibly inexperienced committee.’’

  TNH: ‘‘It was one of the early really big worldcons, about 5,000 attendees. People were responsible for sections of it, like Hilde Hildebrand, who ran the feminist programming track.’’

  PNH: ‘‘Lots of long distance phone calls. Index cards.’’

  TNH: ‘‘No computers. A bunch of us were living in a one-bedroom garret apartment in a down-at-heels area of Central Phoenix. By day it was the convention office, and at night I think we had 11 people sleeping there. One day Patrick covered the walls with sheets of paper, one per program item, and we watched the program grid taking shape.’’

  PNH: ‘‘The big-picture thing is that, in retrospect, the 1976, ‘77, and ‘78 Worldcons were the ones in which the modern structure of Worldcon running was hashed out, sometimes in catastrophic and shambolic ways. The miracle of Iguanacon is that despite the dysfunctionality of the committee, the people constantly resigning in anger or being fired, the backstabbing and double-dealing and everything else, it came off, nobody died, we made $25,000 in profit, and some of the solutions that came out of it have been used as models by subsequent Worldcons.’’

  TNH: ‘‘Some of us were burned out for years after that!’’

  PNH: ‘‘And some people really never got over some of the stupid things that happened.’’

  TNH: ‘‘That was my first Worldcon, and by the time the convention started I was managing editor of publications, I was running the fan room, I was in charge of the daily newsletter, and I was assistant to the head of programmming. Prior to that I had been the committee chauffeur, because I was the one who had a car and could drive. I actually don’t have that many memories of the convention, because I was so exhausted and completely buzzed on adrenalin, running around the whole time. Years later we were talking to S.T. Joshi, who we worked for at Chelsea House in the mid-80s. Turned out he was at Iguanacon. It was his first really big convention, and he was going on about what a great time he’d had at it. Every time we hear that someone had a good time at the convention, we felt much better. Also, Nolacon really helped.’’

  PNH: ‘‘Nolacon II and Iguanacon kinda fight it out for the title of most catastrophically organized Worldcon ever.

  ‘‘After Iguanacon, we briefly moved to San Francisco, where we got married, and then we lived in Seattle for about four years. We published several fairly well-regarded fanzines which were not so much about science fiction – they were fannish fanzines, fanzines about fandom, fans writing about each other or subjects of general interest. We were essentially full time in science fiction fandom and taking crappy jobs to make ends meet. After four years of this we looked at each other and said, ‘This is stupid. We love science fiction, we’re pretty good editors, people keep praising us, so we should figure out how to make money doing this.’’’

  TNH: ‘‘We both had publishing-related backgrounds. My parents started out as small-town newspaper editors. I was a typesetter in college, and had some proofreading experience. Most of it didn’t really come in handy until we got to Toronto and New York, because that’s where the industry is.

  ‘‘The other reason we left Seattle was that I was unaccountably falling asleep in the middle of things, and falling over when people told me jokes. It was diagnosed as narcolepsy. Back then there weren’t sleep/wake disorder centers in every city. If you didn’t get certified by one of those, you were permanently under suspicion because many of the drugs used to treat narcolepsy were street saleable.’’

  PNH: ‘‘We had this nearly year-long interregnum between living as full-time bohemian fanpublishers and conrunners, and cultivating professional careers. It was basically all about getting Teresa’s diagnosis nailed down. We moved to Toronto because they had was a really good scientific study going on the use of certain drugs for sleep disorders that Teresa got into, which got her a good diagnosis and treatment. The single person who got us focused on moving was Paul Williams, who was involved in a lot of odd projects and knew everyone.’’

  TNH: ‘‘This is the Paul Williams who founded Crawdaddy and wrote Das Energi.’’

  PNH: ‘‘And ran the Philip K. Dick estate, and is now sadly struggling with terrible health problems. He was a brilliant guy. He was visiting Seattle, some family thing, and spent a bunch of time with us and sorted out a good life plan for us in terms of how you get work in science fiction publishing. He was a close friend of David Hartwell. So in the middle of all of this moving around and getting Teresa diagnosed, I took Paul’s advice and went off to ABA which was in Dallas that year, and crashed on Hartwell’s floor, and basically hung out and met a lot of publishing people and had a ringside seat to watching David and Paul put together the Philip K. Dick Society. Dick had just died that spring. They had long conversations that went, ‘And over the next ten years we’ll make him into a gigantic Hollywood movie presence,’ and they did all of that, which is amazing.’’

  TNH: ‘‘Paul later sorted out the Theodore Sturgeon estate, too. He was very good. He explained the ways you really get into publishing: ‘‘get to know people, talk to lots of people, be there, be present.’’

  PNH: ‘‘Be in New York. And also, don’t be fussy about only taking work in science fiction. Get experience, any kind of experience that you can. And don’t expect your fannish credentials to count, because in fact they’re very suspicious. Something I understand implicitly these days. A certain kind of enthusiasm, untempered by real-world business know
ledge or common sense, can be bad for business.’’

  TNH: ‘‘New York fandom has always suffered from losing a lot of its people to publishing.’’

  PNH: ‘‘I got a job in NY as an editorial assistant at the Literary Guild. Moshe Feder gave me the connection. He was already working for Ellen Asher at the Science Fiction Book Club at that point.’’

  TNH: ‘‘I was working various temp jobs, and I allowed myself to be sidetracked into becoming the Assistant to the Director of Meetings at the Council on Foreign Relations, because it seemed like an interesting thing to be working for the Illuminati.’’