Made in SA: Eugene Fischer

Eugene Fischer enjoys San Antonio for its warm weather.

EUGENE FISCHER is a new name to many SF readers, but one they’re likely to become acquainted with quickly. A 2008 graduate of the highly regarded CLARION SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY WRITERS WORKSHOP, the San Antonio-based author has already sold a couple of stories to pro markets. One of those, “Husbandry,” is online now at STRANGE HORIZONS, and the other, “Adrift,” is due out this later this month in ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION.

Your story “Husbandry” in Strange Horizons deals with mortality and early onset Alzheimer’s. Not always things one would assume to be on a young writer’s mind. What was the genesis of this particular story?

I wrote “Husbandry” for a fiction writing class which focused on literary fiction.  We were discouraged from writing genre fiction, for reasons that were well-meant but based on premises I disagreed with. For one of my assigned stories I wanted to write a piece of genre fiction that attempted to tick all of the requested literary fiction checkboxes. So I wrote a literary zombie story. The focus on degenerative disease and mortality came out of my thinking about the zombie concept. The popular culture treatment of zombies has a lot of overlap with disease and infirmity, and it seemed to me that it pointed to a possible treatment of mortality as a spectrum, rather than as a binary. I had exposure to geriatric Alzheimer’s from my extended family. The phrase “he was gone before he died” is one I have encountered several times. It seemed a natural choice to link these ideas. I actually didn’t know that early onset Alzheimer’s was a real disease until after I had written my version of it in the story. The way it works in the story is a little different from the real condition, but I figured that if I could redefine the word “death” I could redefine a disease as well.

You were physics major in college, and from that one might assume you write technical or “hard science” fiction. Yet the science in “Husbandry” is pretty spare. Is some of your other work heavier on the hard science element?

I think that most of the science in my writing comes out of the world building, and only makes it onto the page when it directly intersects with a character’s interests or concerns. In “Husbandry” I did a lot of thinking about the ecology of the world I was setting the story in, but only a little of it ended up on the page. “Adrift” is more scientifically rigorous, but still I did a fair bit of research into real networks and routing protocols to understand what my main character’s job was, and only about one line of it made it into the story. Just because I had to figure out the details of an algorithm to believe in a fictional world doesn’t mean that I think the algorithm would be interesting to the reader. So I don’t show a lot of my work, but the upshot is that I have worlds that I feel like I could return to. I have partially developed ideas for further stories set in both of those worlds.

Could you talk about what attending the 2008 Clarion workshop meant for your writing and your understanding of the craft?

It was the experience of going to Clarion that taught me to take myself seriously as a writer. After I got my degree I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, aside from being fairly certain that I didn’t want to be a physicist. Since I had been in a writing program before I started my study of physics, it seemed like something I could enjoy going back to. Applying to Clarion was sort of a test to see if had what it takes. In addition to the validation of getting in, the workshop gave me an invaluable view into the life and concerns of working writers, as well as a support network of other up-and-comers. There were specific things about craft I learned from specific teacthers — Kelly Link taught me to think about story structure in some new ways, Geoff Ryman did the same thing for plot — but the biggest lesson I took away from Clarion was that writing was a world it would be possible for me to enter. Before I went, I really didn’t know if that was true.

You’ve lived in San Antonio at least since high school. What do you like about the town? What’s kept you here?

I enjoy San Antonio well enough, but it’s nothing particularly exciting that has kept me here.  Just a constellation of small, personal influences. Friends and family. And I guess I’m a bit of a homebody. I do love Tex-Mex, and the Spurs, and am not a fan of cold weather. San Antonio is good for those things. I expect I may live somewhere else at some point.

You attended the North East School for the Arts and focused on creative writing. At what point did you know you were interested in the writing life? Were there any formative events that nudged you along that path?

I think it started when I was in middle school. I have been a reader of science fiction my whole life. Both of my parents were fans, and had built their joint collection into a comprehensive SF library before I was born, so I was steeped in the stuff from a young age. When I was eleven or twelve I started writing my own stories, mostly made up of attempts to mimic Fredric Brown and C. M. Kornbluth and early Asimov. They got some positive attention from some of my teachers, which was a notable departure from the norm at a school from which I would end up being expelled. When it was time to go to high school, my mother discovered NESA and suggested it might be a good place for me. I packaged the stories I had written into an application portfolio, and creative writing became a required part of my curriculum for the next four years.

Judging from your blog, you’ve been taking a keen interest in the process the state of Texas uses to select school textbooks. Could you talk a little about your concerns?

Eagerly. The two largest textbook markets in the United States are California and Texas. They are so big that textbook publishers customize their products to compete in those markets, meaning that what Texas and California buy largely dictate what is available in the rest of the country. The state of California is currently bankrupt and slashing education budgets across the board, so Texas and its 48-million-per-year textbook appetite is now the biggest game around. The textbooks that our state buys — and thus the ones that are available to every other state — will be the ones that best fit the curriculum guidelines determined by the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE). And that is where things become problematic, because the TSBOE is a deeply dysfunctional body. The TSBOE is a 15-member panel, and seven of them are self-avowed fundamentalist Christians who vote as a bloc. As the TSBOE makes decisions by simple majority, the fundamentalist bloc only needs one swing vote to carry its motions. They have the support of our religiously conservative governor, and so both the current and previous chairs of the TSBOE are members of this bloc. They are all biblical literalists and creationists, openly antagonistic of the concept of separation of church and state. In 2009, they attempted to revise the state’s science curricula to reflect their creationist worldview, which mobilized scientifically-inclined people across Texas to travel to Austin and protest at TSBOE hearings; an unprecedented demonstration that resulted in the recent replacement of the Chair. The curriculum under revision this year is social studies, and the fundamentalist bloc is trying to require textbooks that specify Christianity as a foundational element of the American identity. There was an excellent article about the TSBOE by Russell Shorto, “How Christian Were the Founders?” recently published in the New York Times Magazine. It explores these issues in detail, and profiles some of the more shockingly colorful characters currently making decisions about public education. This should matter to people. The educational products studied in public schools across the country are being determined by the board of education in a single state, and that board is dominated by a group with a fringe-ideological axe to grind. There’s nothing about this situation that seems acceptable to me, and I think it should be an item of national interest. It is my hope that the results of the election coming up on March 2 will weaken the fundamentalist bloc. I’ve written details about how people can help achieve that on my blog.

Your next story, “Adrift,” is coming out in Asimov’s Science Fiction. What can you tell us about it?

“Adrift” is a story set in an alternate present, and you could probably call it a hard-SF story. It’s about a large-scale technology I made up, and how it has unintentional effects on a real-world political situation in Africa. There are some refugees, and an unlikely encounter that changes several people’s lives. In some ways it a story of how, as William Gibson put it, “the street finds its own use for things.” In other ways it’s something not entirely unlike a love story. It’s in the April/May double issue, which hits the stands March 2nd. I hope people like it.

Anything else you’ve been working on that’s worth a mention?

I’m working on a new story about electric cars and organized crime, but it’s in the very early stages. I’ve also started to get interested in interactive fiction, or IF. IF is the modern extension of the old Infocom era text adventure games, like ZORK. It turns out there has been an active community of enthusiasts continuing to write and make tools for creating interactive fiction for two decades now. It’s something I’d like to try my hand at, so I’ve started playing around with an IF creation language called Inform 7.

And, finally, here’s something we ask almost every interviewee: Could you name your top five sf/fantasy/horror books, comic books (or graphic novels) and films?

As I’m sure you’ve been told before, that’s a tough question! I reserve the right to give different answers if anyone ever asks me again, but for now, restricting myself to one work per writer…
Books: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang, The Xenogenesis Trilogy by Octavia Butler (I read it in omnibus so I’m counting it as one book), Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link, and The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem.
Graphic Novels: From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, We3 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, The Sandman by Neil Gaiman and various artists, Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo and The Nikopol Trilogy by Enki Bilal.
Films: The Prestige, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Brazil, Gattaca, The Incredibles.