AWASH IN THE CRYSTAL RAIN:

AN INTERVIEW WITH TOBIAS BUCKELL

Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He now lives in Ohio. He has published stories in various magazines and anthologies. He is a Clarion graduate, Writers of The Future winner, and Campbell Award for Best New SF Writer Finalist. His work has received Honorable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and Year’s Best Science Fiction.

His first novel, Crystal Rain, will be out from Tor Books in 2006.

KPB: Firstly Tobias, thanks for taking the time out to speak with us. You've gathered plenty of acclaim as a proponent of fiction in the short form, and for most writers moving to novels seems to be the natural progression. Crystal Rain will be your first published novel; is it the first you've written? And how difficult did you find the transition from short form to novel?

TB: No problem, I’m happy to chat with you guys. Thanks for hunting me down! Yeah, I’m a big proponent of short fiction. In some ways I seem to be emulating the classic genre career. I started working on short fiction to get my chops in late high school when I realized that writing a novel represented such an enormous investment of time and energy. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I got really serious about writing as a sophomore in college. Over the next five years I wrote over a hundred stories, mostly as experiments. Each story let me focus on different things I didn’t feel I understood. So I focused on how to write better dialogue, or which tense or point of view worked, and got better over time. I also attended Clarion, the science fiction and fantasy workshop, which helped me a great deal. And then after I started selling short fiction the opportunity to write a novel came along.

So yes, Crystal Rain is actually the first novel I’ve written, and after all those years of writing short fiction it was quite an adjustment. The instant gratification of finishing a short story in a week or two versus months for the novel made it a bit tough, but I’ll have to say I’ve always loved novels. I probably read as many novels as short stories. I love the long sense of immersion into another world that you get with a good novel, so slipping into writing a novel felt more natural to me.

KPB: Tell us a little about Crystal Rain's journey into print. Was it embraced early by the NY publishers or was it an arduous slog from house to house?

TB: Well, my agent, Joshua Bilmes, was the one who talked me into writing Crystal Rain. Until then I’d been focused on the short fiction. He asked for a proposal after he found out I’d missed being nominated for the Campbell Award For Best New Writer by a couple votes. It got a few odd rejections while it was being shopped around. It’s a book that obviously has this Caribbean, multi-racial background. And I’m a white looking but multi-racial author, which in the US is confusing as it is. Some publishers were not sure how to categorize all that. And even though the book has this strongly ‘ethnic’ background, it’s primarily an adventure, not a literary feeling book. But most publishers that passed on it just didn’t seem to have the time to get around to reading it by the time we’d started getting offers on it. My editor at Tor, Paul Stevens, was so enthusiastic about the book that it was a no brainer for us to go with him.

KPB: Crystal Rain is set on the planet of Nanagada, a world that has an unusual and exotic Caribbean feel to it. You currently live in Ohio, but were born in the Caribbean. Was it hard to write such a setting from memory, while snow fell outside your window? And how have your sea legs reacted to living in a landlocked state?

TB: It often got weird to write about beaches and look outside to see dark, gray, skies and snow. I found these webcams that gave me live video of beaches or other tropical landscapes. I kept plenty of these links around to trigger memories. Except I found more often than not they made me homesick.

KPB: A related question, from someone who grew up by the ocean and also now resides in landlocked Ohio. In my writing I have found myself drawn to the sea as a setting, perhaps because I pine for it in real life. Might this be the reason you chose the Caribbean-like setting of Nanagada for Crystal Rain?

TB: I think you’re dead-on there. To say I miss the sea is an understatement, so I turn to those settings a lot in my fiction. I am slowly finding some replacements for the ocean in my life. Just recently I found a 600 acre reservoir above the tree line here in Ohio that’s very windy and perfect for windsurfing. Not quite the same, but still a lot of fun.

Also, the thing is, I’m happily married, have two cats and a dog, and have a wonderful little house in a Norman Rockwell-esque little college town here and work in tech support for my dayjob. In the Midwest. It doesn’t scream out as a setting for high drama to me, even though I have a wonderful life for myself here.

KPB: When I read that you were born in the Caribbean, I pictured white sandy beaches, palm trees and turquoise tides, but it wasn't always a paradise for the people of Grenada, was it, particularly given the political climate at the time?

TB: Well, one of the things I tried to demonstrate in Crystal Rain was that there is more than just beaches and palm trees to a Caribbean identity, so I tried to take most of those out of the setting. But the Caribbean has this fascinating mix of peoples and history that I love. I grew up around Hindi, Muslims, Jews and Rastafarians. St. Thomas has the oldest synagogue in the western hemisphere.  Each island has a different story to tell about itself, and they’re all extraordinary.

You mention Grenada, and while I was five at the time, most of my early memories are of the American Intervention, or War, depending on your perspective. Grenada suffered a great deal after the colonial period. Despite becoming its own country, large spice, sugar, and banana corporations were responsible for the main economic activity on the islands and they didn’t put much money back into the island or offer much in the way of personal wages. There were infrastructure problems. Things were sustenance level for many if not most.

When a system has failed you, and you’re desperate, you’ll often reject the system failing you, so the island rejected capitalism. For a brief period some grand accomplishments were made in infrastructure, and there was a strong sense of pride at getting together to do something about a seriously lacking situation. But as you know, it went sour. People holding power grabbed for more power, people disagreed about how to run things, and suddenly people were getting shot and martial law was declared.

So Grenada is back to where it was before, though there seems to be more and more tourism related economic activity. I like that, but the problem is still that the large hotels are built by outside entities who take most of that money out. In many ways it isn’t much better than the agribusiness.

Now all that makes me sound very anti-corporate. I’m not. I actually consulted for some small industrial businesses that were adding satellite branches in Grenada and wanted to prepare their managers for working in the Caribbean. I found them to be more interested in the island as a potential and long term partner, which is hopeful.

KPB: Admittedly I'm not as well-read in the SF or 'steampunk' genre as I am in others, but your use of Aztec-like culture and mythology combined with more modern technology struck me as ingenious, and entirely believable. What inspired the tale?

TB: I’ve always thought it ridiculous to read a novel where all the people in a story have access to the same technology, who live on a planet that has one type of weather or feature, and who share the same culture planet-wide. When I decided to write Crystal Rain I wanted to make the world feel credible. Also, I needed a credible counter culture to what I knew would be my Caribbean culture: Aztecs.

I’ve always been obsessed with the Aztecs, so I thought it would be interesting to use them as the bad guys, because, man, they were some scary folk. When you read the textbooks they make it out like Cortes and a handful of his homies walked in with some guns and disease and kicked ass and took names. The truth is that as Cortes started his march towards the Tenochtitlan everyone the Aztecs ever pissed off decided to join him and lend a hand. By the time Cortes reached the city he had a lot of armed locals pitching in for payback. But their culture, and particularly their mythology, is interesting as you dig down. The parallels between the Aztecs obsession with blood and the Christian beliefs can be oddly similar from a distance, and I really wanted to show how that thinking worked for someone on a personal level.

KPB: Who do you cite as your influences?

TB: The big three: Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, got me reading. I started reading when I was about five years old. My first novel was a Clive Cussler novel, which I still remember to this day, but my second book was Childhood’s End and my mind never quite recovered. My interests have always been in a mix of adventure and mind expanding moments buried in the middle as nuggets, which is why I gravitated towards SF. Citizen of the Galaxy by Heinlein had this huge effect on me as a kid, because it gave me this Horatio Alger sort of mentality that I needed. As a kid we struggled a bit and I had a rough childhood, so these kinds of books were important to me.

The other major book for me was Islands in the Net, by Bruce Sterling, as he was the first author I encountered who treated the islands as nations and world players in their own right, not just another tourist destination. Of course, Bruce didn’t keep the whole thing set in Grenada where it starts, but I made a mental note of that and William Gibson’s nod to reggae and Rastafarianism in one of his books. I had given up on the islands being taken seriously until then. And to be honest, when in the islands, I wasn’t thinking about setting things there as much as I do now because, well, I lived there and everywhere else seemed more exotic. It took leaving the islands and coming here to reorient me.

At the Clarion workshop Mike Resnick, Tim Powers, and Karen Joy Fowler each yanked me aside to yell at me to show people the Caribbean through my fiction, which I had a little with my first story workshopped there. Until that year I’d been putting that off, because I knew I wasn’t a good writer yet, and I was nervous about doing the Caribbean wrong. But after three writers I had a lot of respect for all said the same thing it finally got through!

KPB: The relevance of awards and the impact they can have on a writer's career has long been the subject of debate. Do you think winning the Writers of the Future competition and your nomination for the John W. Campbell Award helped advance your career in any way?

TB: Well yes, and I can even quantify it! The JWC near nomination the year before I was actually nominated basically netted me my agent. He took a look at my proposal for Crystal Rain. I always tell new writers that agents pretty much never do that, and the JWC award was the reason. Joshua liked the book idea, had me write it, and then sold it. We used the nomination as a selling point as well. I would probably only just now be getting to writing novels if it weren’t for that, as I hadn’t planned to start a novel until my 25^th birthday, and the JWC jump started all that.

KPB: Your next novel is entitled Ragamuffin. Can you tell us anything about it?

TB: Twist my arm why don’t you? I call Crystal Rain my Caribbean Steampunk novel, and Ragamuffin will be my Caribbean Space Opera. It’s a look into the outer universe that led to the creation of the world Nanagada in Crystal Rain, and expands the scope of things a bit. It’s a stew of menacing aliens, plucky Caribbean heros, and we get to meet Pepper’s granddaughter, which I thought would interest a lot of the readers. And the Aztecs get into space, which might complicate things. I’m trying to have a lot of fun with it. I believe as an author if I’m having fun writing something it comes through to the reader and becomes infectious.

KPB: Many authors these days are content to have a webpage or simple website that gives the basic information about their work for anyone who looks for it, but your website (at www.tobiasbuckell.com) is a little more than that. It features, among other things, a weblog that you use to comment on facets of the writing business, and chronicle the progress of Crystal Rain. Is it hard to maintain this level of involvement, with a job, family and your fiction? What, if any, benefits have you seen from the log and the site itself?

TB: I probably wouldn’t have a career without the website. Back in early ’98 I started keeping a webjournal to put myself out in public, and to join a community of other writers who were journaling about their writing. Stephen Leigh, a great novelist, Vera Nazarian, who works for Wildside and has some books with them, and Ron Collins were some people who welcomed me in very early to this community of journaling authors. They provided me with a lot of advice and assistance as I wrote about what I was doing. And then I started meeting more writers, attending cons and so forth, joining workshops. The chance to join the community of writers was important and gave me a lot of leads. I started adding in links about whatever I found interesting to the site, which is when I think it became more of a weblog than just a journal.

Then something odd started happening when I began to sell my short fiction and see it come out. I started getting email and comments from people who were readers and looking me up online, and every month my website traffic rose a bit. Now it’s to the point where I get as many as a thousand unique hits a day or more. Every time I go to a convention there’s always someone there who already knows me and has this connection with me from reading the weblog who I’ve never met before. It’s amazing. I love it.

My only worry is that I’m boring the crap out of people, or being too narcissistic, and now that the novel is out, talking too much about it. I mainly just try to be myself and not care or worry about it, so it is a pretty fair representation of me. Just ask my wife, most of the time I come home my conversations start with ‘so I read this article online about…’ which is pretty much how the blog works. Like I mentioned before, not a whole lot going on in the Midwest where I live.

It isn’t that hard for me to maintain the weblog itself. I use RSS feeds to track three or four hundred news sites and weblogs I enjoy, and it doesn’t take all that much time to parse the headlines to spot something I might find interesting. There’s more I don’t blog than I do.

KPB: One of your articles, an author advance survey, created quite a buzz across the 'Net. A study of novel advances in the industry, based on anonymous entries from writers, the results were intriguing, and at times, dispiriting. What is your own view of the state of the SF novel market for writers today?

TB: Well, the numbers were dispiriting, sure, but the thing is the survey also noted about half those writers were making a living writing somehow. So about fifty of them were making a living. How many SF writers were doing that in the sixties or seventies if I’d taken a survey? I think if I were to do the survey again, I would focus more on how writers might make a living and off of what sources. Did they make a lot of speakers fees? Write nonfiction articles? How were their foreign sales? How much did they earn in royalties? All I did was look at the advances, so it was a limited survey, and done to ask a limited question, which was what could a first time writer expect to get as a first time author? I don’t know how much I really helped us understand how authors make a living with that survey.

KPB: Science fiction affords the reader a glimpse of the future, near and far. Aside from Ragamuffin, what can your readers hope to see from you in the future?

TB: Well, I’ve got a couple stories coming out in various locations. One will be out in the spring issue of a magazine you might have heard of called Subterranean Magazine. There’s an anthology called Tales of a Bygone Future that will have a story of mine, and then finally at some point I know a story of mine will be in the magazine Electric Velocipede.

I have enough short stories to think about a collection, but I haven’t been pursuing that very hard right now as writing the new novel has taken up most of my time. I did recently show my agent some ideas for a YA Fantasy and this odd steampunk dwarf fantasy I’d like to write, but they’re very much up in the air. I imagine we’ll wait to see if Tor likes Ragamuffin enough to ask me for a third SF book, which would be my preference, as I’m having a lot of fun with these books right now.

KPB: In addition to your writing, you also work at Bluffton University. When do you find time to write; what is your writing schedule like?

TB: I’m still struggling with that. I wrote Crystal Rain over my ‘dinner break’ when I worked the late night shift at Bluffton University’s technology center, and then again from one in the morning until three when I got home. Now I’m the manager of the center and all their classroom A/V technology, and I have to do the eight to five thing. When I go to lunch there are people around, it’s hard to be anti-social. I’m also not a morning person, I’m still struggling with the eight to five thing, three years later. I most write in the late evening or evening, though sometimes I end up getting up early at 5:30am to workout and then write. But that’s hard to keep with.

KPB: Thanks a million for your time, Tobias, and best of luck with Crystal Rain!

TB: Oh, thank you for letting me babble on. Hopefully there’ll be some people left who will continue reading after all that.

This interview originally appeared in Subterranean Press Newsletter