Alaska almost qualifies as a science fiction destination:  There are landscapes that look like moonscapes, weather that reaches the far end of human capacity to endure, and men and women who have learned to survive--and flourish--under all kinds of challenging conditions.  So how does Alaska affect the work of a science fiction writer who has made his life here?  Today’s conversation is with MICHAEL A ARMSTRONG, author of the novel BRIDGE OVER HELL and other science fiction writings.

Michael, decades ago you and I were both enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.  I recall you teaching an undergraduate seminar in science fiction with William Gibson’s Neuromancer as a text.  These many years later, you’re still writing science fiction, but your life path has gone in other directions too.  Tell us about your writing career.

Shortly after getting my MFA, I sold my thesis novel, "PRAK" (for People's Republic of Alaska) to Warner Books; it was later published as "After the Zap." "Bridge Over Hell" actually was my second novel written. While working on my MFA, I sold a short story, "Going After Arviq," to Janet Morris, a writer and editor, for her anthology, "Afterwar." Janet also had started a fantasy shared-world series, Heroes in Hell, set in the classical hell. She asked me to write several stories for that anthology series. One of them, "Madly Meeting Logically," with the poet Hart Crane as its hero, became "Bridge Over Hell." I signed a contract with Baen Books, the publisher then of the Heroes in Hell series, to write "Bridge Over Hell."

However, when I delivered the final draft, Baen had run into some cash flow problems and kept delaying payment on the last third of the advance. Rather than pay me for an accepted manuscript, Jim Baen, the owner, went back on his word and rejected the novel. I kept the initial two-thirds of the advance (which was more than I got paid for "After the Zap") and the rights. A few years ago when Janet revived the Heroes in Hell series through her own small-press publisher, Perseid, she agreed to resurrect "Bridge Over Hell." So, 25 years after I wrote the novel, it saw print. I've also done more Heroes in Hell stories, for "Lawyers in Hell" (about Richard Nixon representing the Scottish Borders reiver, Kinmont Willie Armstrong), "Rogues in Hell" (which has the original Hart Crane story that was never published), and more recently, "Poets in Hell."

The happenstance about meeting Janet Morris was that she recommended me to her agent, the late Perry Knowlton of Curtis Brown, which helped start my career. When people ask about why you should write short fiction, that's my answer: it can lead to invaluable contacts. "Going After Arviq" became my third novel, "Agviq," like "After the Zap" a post-nuclear holocaust novel set in Alaska. It's a bit more serious, though, about a white anthropologist stranded in Barrow after a nuclear war. The Inupiaq people of my novel have lost their subsistence ways — a possible but not yet real circumstance —including the hunting of agviq, the bowhead whale. To survive, they must relearn their traditional culture, with my heroine a reluctant assistant.

My fourth novel is "The Hidden War," the science fiction space novel I always wanted to write as a boy. It's classic science fiction, supposedly about alien invaders and brave defenders of human civilization, except that its hero has grown up on an asteroid colony whose culture is based on the Beat Generation of the late 1950s and early 1960s. When I wrote the novel, I'd read Allen Ginsberg to get into the proper groove. The late Brian Thomsen, who was my editor for "After the Zap" and "Agviq," bought "The Hidden War" when he moved from Warner Books to TSR Books.

I'm now trying to sell "Truck Stop Earth," a novel set in Alaska about a guy who truly believes he has been abducted by aliens. I wrote that one after a critic who reviewed "The Hidden War" said it wasn't as wonky as "After the Zap." "You want wonky," I thought, "I'll show you wonky." "Truck Stop Earth" is fighting a tortured path toward publication. My elevator pitch for it is "Holden Caulfield with aliens."

That's sort of the story of my writing career. I've been publishing since 1980, when my first story saw print in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I've lost count of how many short stories I've published, but it's in the dozens. I've been writing seriously longer than that, since 1975, when I attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop. I write in fits and starts, publish in fits and starts, and write because that's what I do.

The challenge for any writer not lucky enough or persistent enough or whatever enough to make a career solely from his or her art is to make a living in some other ways. After I got my MFA, I worked 13 years teaching as an adjunct instructor at UAA, first while living in Anchorage and later after moving to Homer, mainly through the distance education program. The idea of working as an adjunct is to gain experience to get a full-time teaching job. I realized early on that to get a tenured position I might have to move outside of Alaska, and I don't want to do that. Alaska is my home. To get hired as a professor means sucking up to a lot of academics. Academic culture is ruthless and petty, and I'm not good at sucking up to people. Alaska also has an inferiority complex. In academia and other fields, if you got your degree or experience in Alaska, you can't be any good, but if you taught at a cow college in the Midwest, you're a genius. That's changing, but not fast enough. 

The University of Alaska balances its budget on the backs of adjunct instructors, and to its shame does not adequately compensate them for the work they do. I calculated once that the first 10 students in my class paid my salary and the next 15 students worth of tuition were profit for the university. I quit teaching as an adjunct after I helped organize United Academic Adjuncts. Shortly after that for some reason UAA quit offering me teaching contracts. 

That didn't matter. In 1999 I started working for the Homer News, at which I make a modest living, with benefits like health insurance. (I realized the importance of that last May when I went into cardiac arrest and had to be medvaced to Anchorage, which is how I wound up with a pacemaker.) The important thing about being a reporter is that I get paid for telling stories, which is really what I like to do. The stories I tell happen to be true. I meet a lot of interesting people and learn a lot. At a weekly newspaper, a reporter by necessity must be a generalist, quick to learn about hundreds of topics. Last week I had to learn about Alaska petroleum tax policy and West African music and culture. As Robert Heinlein said, "Specialization is for insects."


There are so many subgenres in science fiction.  I found a partial list that describes hard science fiction, soft and social science fiction, cyberpunk, time travel, alternate history, military science fiction, superhuman, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic, space opera, space frontier and space western.  How do you categorize your books? 

The convenient labels are science fiction or fantasy. "Bridge Over Hell" is fantasy. Most everything else is science fiction. I've written post-apocalyptic fiction, hard and soft sf, social sf and even cyberpunk. With "After the Zap" I tried to start the genre of Bush Punk, but it didn't take. Science fiction is a wide genre with many edges that defies definition and categorization. I like Darko Suvin's idea of sf as exploring the concept of estrangement. One of the more useful suggestions is that of Fred Pohl, who said "science fiction explores the futures we are making to see if we want to live there."

There's also an irony to sf. For all these years we wrote about societies in which science and technology changed quickly and had a major impact on our culture, and here we are, living in that future. In some ways to write science fiction is to write about the modern world. I think the difference is a matter of tone. 


Is there a community of science fiction writers in Alaska?

I've been a member of the Science-fiction and Fantasy Writers of America since 1981 and served as Western Regional Director from 1996-99. Alaska has as many SFWA members as Delaware and Louisiana, so we're in good shape. Dana Stabenow, the mystery writer who got her start in science fiction, lives a few miles from me in Homer. The rest live in Fairbanks and Dillingham. We keep in touch mostly through Facebook and online. Sometimes, but only rarely, we'll get together at conferences. Other Alaska sf and fantasy writers are George Guthridge, Elyse Guttenberg, Terry Boren and David Marusek.


Has living in Alaska most of your adult life colored your writing?  Although you don’t site your books in Alaska, I’m guessing you have had experiences that flow into your writing, either into your plots or into your characters.

Actually, "After the Zap," "Agviq," and "Truck Stop Earth" are all set in Alaska. I grew up in Florida but have lived here since 1979, more than half my life. (I was born in 1956.) Many of my short stories also are set in Alaska, such as "The Duh Vice" and "Old One Antler." The struggle for survival, a common Alaska theme, gets used in some of my deep-space stories. 

I based the idea of one story, "Catch the Wotan!", about a man adrift in space, on the idea of being adrift at sea in a survival suit. Another space short story, "The Deadliest Moop," can essentially be described as "crab fishermen in space." (They're hunting for moop, material out of place, detritus from exploded satellites and other space junk.) "Agviq" came out of summers working on archaeological digs in the arctic. The story of Alaska is about struggling against a harsh and dangerous environment. That theme gets reflected often in my work.


Writers write for all sorts of reasons, but most yearn for publication.  Do you think it’s more difficult to sell and market your science fiction books from Alaska than it would be from urban centers Outside, where agents, publishers and booksellers have more of a physical presence?  Or does the existence of the Internet negate the effects of geographical boundaries?

It would probably be easier to sell my work if I made periodic trips to New York. The value of networking cannot be underestimated. I've mostly worked with agents, at least on my books, which made selling them easier. However, when I've tried to sell books cold, I've discovered agents often don't want to work that hard and can be pretty useless in many ways. Science fiction and fantasy publishing deals often get made at conventions and conferences like the Worldcons or World Fantasy Con. I don't go to those too much. I do maintain online contacts with many writers, agents, and editors, a practice that goes back way before Facebook to GEnie, an early online community of the 1990s. The Internet, if properly used, negates many of the geographic limitations of Alaska.

Alaska does have an advantage in that many people think of it as exotic and mysterious and want to know more about our state and its people. Works set in Alaska still have a bit of an edge over, say, Kansas.


Are you working on a new book now?

I'm always working on a new book. The book on my front burner is "Borderers," a fantasy novel that's really a science fiction novel. I follow the advice of one of my Clarion teachers, Kate Wilhelm, who said, "Don't talk too much about your writing until it's done. It sucks the life out of it." Borderers is set in the fictional Alaska town of Della, a stand-in for Homer, which also was the setting for "Truck Stop Earth."


What are some of your favorite books and authors?

I learned to write sf novels by reading Phillip K. Dick. I'm especially fond of his "The Man in the High Castle." His use of the I Ching inspired me in "After the Zap." As a teenager, I read voraciously in sf. Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein — all the great masters, I've read them. I studied with Joe Haldeman, Samuel R. Delany, Gene Wolfe, Robert Zelazny, Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm, and consider them all major influences. I'm fond of the modernist and Beat poets, but I don't read as much modern poetry as I should. I also don't read much modern sf. William Gibson still impresses me — I think he's the very model of a modern sf writer. I really like Cory Doctorow's young adult novels, "Little Brother" and "Homeland."

I don't read much fantasy, especially high fantasy. My response to fantasy was a young adult novel I never finished, but may someday, an anarchist fantasy called "Sam The Thumbless." I might be the only sf writer never to have read J.R.R. Tolkien. I made a vain effort to read The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but stopped 100 pages in when I realized Bilbo et al. still frigging hadn't left the Shire. 

Outside of sf, I read thrillers and mysteries: Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin, Martin Cruz Smith. I regularly raid the advance reading copy pile at my wife's bookstore. (Jenny is a partner at the Homer Bookstore.) I'll pick up anything that looks fun. I just read John Straley's "Cold Storage, Alaska," a fine and quirky mystery novel. I should read more general fiction, but not as much as I should. That's why I wound up in a degree in humanities from New College of Florida, and not, as would be expected, a degree in literature. I would get distracted from the core reading list and go off and explore things like Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley or the late 19th century romantic fantasists. 

Books by Alaskans and books about Alaska come in all genres including memoir, biography, suspense, children’s books, science fiction and romance.  I have a theory that all these books, regardless of subject or genre, are colored to some degree by the authors’ experiences of Alaska’s vast, diverse and challenging landscapes and cultures.  In the next few months, I’ll be posting conversations with some authors who site their books in Alaska, and some Alaskan authors whose work may not seem (at least at first look) to be related to their Alaskan experiences.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Alaskan author MICHAEL MCBRIDE.

Michael McBride is the author of THE LAST WILDERNESS:  ALASKA’S RUGGED COAST, released in October 2013.  Michael and I usually encounter each other once a year, when we join a yoga/meditation group on the Big Island of Hawaii orchestrated by our wonderful yoga teacher and friend, Lynne Minton.  In January 2013, Michael and I gave a reading during an evening program at the Kalani Honua Retreat Center.  

Michael, in many ways your memoir is the quintessential Alaskan book.  When non-Alaskans think about Alaska, I think they imagine the kind of life you depict.  Yet even most Alaskans will never experience the kind of wilderness adventure that you are living.  For those who haven’t yet read your book, will you describe how you came to settle in Kachemak Bay?

As a bachelor in l966 and as a new arrival in Alaska and just out of college, I had the good fortune to be invited into the home of Clem and Diana Tillion in Halibut Cove across Kachemak Bay from Homer. One look at the Bay and that community made it clear to me that I would spend the rest of my life in that area. Growing up in a military family, I had never put down roots because of those regular changes of place. When asked where I grew up, I usually said Japan because as one of the first families and first children into Japan after the war, it colored my sense of place very powerfully and I brought that with me to Kachemak Bay. I was a stranger in a strange land in both places, yet was comfortable and immediately at home in these situations. Japanese was my second language as a child. The new language I needed to learn was one of survival in a rugged place without roads or electricity or other people.   This attitude has figured throughout my life and led to deep roots in Africa, for example where I  co-founded a non-profit group called The Bateleurs, Volunteer Pilots Flying for Conservation in Africa, and to my election as an African Game Ranger. There again, another language, an unusual culture and endless opportunity for reinvention.  

As newlyweds, we moved to China Poot Bay, a roadless estuary across Kachemak Bay from Homer, where we bought an unfinished one room log cabin with no electricity or running water and no roads or neighbors. This presented serious challenges to a newly married couple with few skills, no jobs and zero money but was made easier because there was a clear vision of what was possible. Hard work and determination paid off and our grandchildren are now fully engaged in setting the lodge table and harvesting salmon from set nets and expanding their own horizons at the lodge kitchen table. 

You mentioned during your reading in January that you’ve been writing for many years.   What kind of writing have you undertaken, and how did it culminate in this book?

In the mid l970’s I was asked by the editor to write an article for The Alaska Outdoors Magazine. I wrote about the value of incorporating ethics into the sports of hunting and fishing. This serious conversation stimulated a lifelong awareness of the value of communicating effectively about the wise use of resources. I have contributed articles to the International Journal of Wilderness about Alaska and Africa and have written a string of articles for National Geographic at News Watch, their electronic newspaper.  

A friend, Boyd Norton, is the author of 17 books with people like Diane Fossey, Peter Matthiessen, Richard Leakey, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and others. He pestered me to write a story about how we felt on the first day we ventured across a storm-tossed bay to begin a life in the wilderness. He showed it to our mutual friend Bob Baron, publisher at Fulcrum in Golden Colorado, and that became the first chapter.  

Do you have a favorite passage or scene in THE LAST WILDERNESS?

Page 175, pushing forward the throttle of our floatplane on a remote wilderness lake where we built a lovely refuge for ourselves, big and spacious for clients from around the world who seek this kind of place. 

What are some of your favorite books?

Margaret Murie --Two in the Far North, and Island Between 
John Hanes --Stars Snow and Fire 
Dr. Ian McCallum --Ecological Intelligence 
Barry Lopez --Arctic Dreams 
Charles Wohlforth --The Fate of Nature -- The Whale and the Supercomputer
EO Wilson  --The Naturalist 
Corey Ford   -- Where the Sea Breaks Its Back 

From our encounters over the years, I know that yoga and meditation are a big part of your life.  Please tell us how you came to develop these practices, and how they have affected your personal path.

I have a great love of opposites, real and imagined. I love being very active and competitive and believe that I must balance this drive with restorative quiet and peacefulness. This is reflected in the choices of places to live and profession but it is still easy to make life in such a place too busy and driven. 

Yoga in the end is about finding a pathway to joy, and for me that is best accomplished by turning inward to the indwelling teacher. That turning leads to the discovery of real concentration, then meditation and at last surrender. The BIG surrender when this dance is over, and the LITTLE surrender that is accessible every day in a regular practice. 

Do you have a saying or motto that embodies how you feel about your life?

“Never Stop Exploring” and “Don’t let being lost spoil the fun of not knowing where you are.’

Do your plans for the future include another book?

Yes, Alaska/Africa as mirror images of on another (opposites again and how much they are usually alike, starting with man and woman, earth and sky, etc.):

One is hot, one cold but they are on opposite sides of the planet. Both are tourism icons/hotspots. Both have wild animals out there that will eat you. Both have extreme climates. Both have mosquitos. Both have charismatic mega fauna. Both have vast areas of little known wilderness. Both have a disenfranchised indigenous people who, having been overwhelmed in colonialism, still seek their rightful “place in the sun.” Both have to deal with a hungry and rapacious industrial world that wants our natural resources 

I want to use the curiosity provoked by these “gee whiz” statements to give a segue into my observation that the environmental conversation since Rachel Carson, Aldo Leupold, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, and hundreds like them, has not been successful enough to direct us to a sustainable path to the future.

If this is true (and I think it is) then it begs a question, how do we reshape the conversation? I cannot do much about this global dialogue, but I can do a little to reshape the conversation with what I write. If I can provoke curiosity, I might be about to introduce new perspectives and “tweak” the conversation just a little.

It is a big thought, a big undertaking, but ----
 “Lest our reach exceed our grasp, what else might life be for?”

Ah, romance--in the cold!  

I didn’t realize how many romance writers have chosen Alaska as a site for their novels until I started my search.  But then, perhaps it’s not surprising, because there are a lot of romance readers hungry for books, and Alaska qualifies as an exotic location.  According to statistics provided by the website theromancereader.com, romance accounts for almost 50% of the mass market sales in the United States.  The same website quotes research by Barnes and Noble indicating that romance customers can typically spend up to $100 per month for books and will read as many as 40 books per month.  (It also cites a Psychology Today study indicating that women who read romance novels make love with their partners 74% more often than women who don’t.)

To get some insight about romance novels in general, but more specifically romance writing in connection with Alaska, I contacted Tiffinie Helmer, author of SHIVER, a Romance on the Edge novel, and numerous other romance and mystery/suspense novels.

Tiffinie, you have very strong connections to Alaska.  You were raised in Alaska and attended the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.  I also understand that you engage in commercial fishing in the Bering Sea in the summertime.  Perhaps it’s logical that you place your romances in Alaska.  Is there anything about Alaska that you think is particularly conducive to the romance genre?  

It’s wild. Men are men and most of the women I know, including myself, love a man who knows how to survive in a land that is extreme. They are problem solvers and don’t waste an opportunity. There are no games. Life is precious. Love even more so. The type of man who thrives in this untamed, hostile environment is one that I’m extremely attracted to. In fact, I married my own wild man of Alaska. 

Tell us how you started your writing career.  Did you always know you wanted to be a romance writer?  

Reading has always been an escape, but there comes a time in a writer’s life where reading isn’t enough and you are compelled to pick up a pen and create your own story. I got serious about writing when my youngest child headed off to kindergarten, but I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t telling stories. My mother used to tell me to quit lying when I was really young. So I honed my craft until my mother couldn’t tell if I was lying or not. Then I started writing them down.  

What do you think romance readers look for in a romance novel? 

A happy ever after! Romance readers know going in that there will be a happy ending. The guy will get the girl and they will live happily ever after. No one dies at the end, unless he’s the villain. I also think romance readers are incredibly loyal because romance novels promise hope. No matter what is going on in the reader’s life, he or she knows that this story will end happily. The good guy, even if he has a bit of bad in him, wins the girl. Or the girl wins the guy. Either way, love wins. Why would you want to read anything else? 

I counted nine of your novels for sale on Amazon.  Do they all use Alaska as their setting?  You locate your latest novel, Shiver, in Chatanika, a community north of Fairbanks.  Is this a part of the state that you’re particularly familiar with? 

On Monday I have an anthology being released called MY BLOODY VALENTINE. My story in the collection is HEARTLESS and not set in Alaska. But other than that all my other books are set in Alaska. Alaska is HUGE, and I like to take my readers on a journey of what Alaska has to offer. Each story is set in a different part of the state. Those who are Deadliest Catch fans will get a taste of that in HOOKED. If you watch Alaska: The Last Frontier check out EDGE which is set on Kachemak Bay outside of Homer. As for SHIVER, I grew up in Fairbanks and Chatanika is only 30 miles away. DEATH CACHE, my 4th book in the Romance on the Edge Novels is set up by the Arctic Circle.

In Shiver, your main character Raven is an Alaska Native, and I’m presuming, given her location, that she’s Athabascan.  She’s strong-willed and resilient as well as strikingly attractive.  Is she a typical romance protagonist?

She is in regards to being resilient and strong-willed. I consider myself a strong woman. I’m a freaking commercial fisherman, strong is just the tip of the iceberg. In the coming year, I will be publishing stories on the Wild Women of Alaska and you can bet the farm they will be resilient, strong-willed, and will probably kick some ass. I can’t wait to meet them.

Tell me one thing about romance novels that you think people who don’t read romance novels might not know. 

They are more than just sex. I’ve seen people turn their nose up at me when they hear that I write romance. These are usually the same people who have never read romance. Romance is about relationships. I write books about relationships. It doesn’t matter who you are, you can benefit from books that deal with relationships. I love what you quoted earlier about women who read romance novels making love with their partners 74% more than women who don’t. That alone should tell people something. Women, and men (as I have a big male readership), are more attentive of their partner’s needs, probably better conversationalists and communicators with others in their life as well.   

What kind of books do you enjoy reading?  Who are some of your favorite authors? 

Romance, of course, but I also read mystery, sci-fi/fantasy and thrillers. I cut my teeth on Nora Roberts, so I have to mention her. Linda Howard, Jennifer Crusie, and Karen Marie Moning are some of my auto buys. In mystery it’s Harlan Coben and Janet Evanovich, Sci-fi/fantasy Kevin Hearne is my man along with Jim Butcher, and Charlaine Harris. Some great new authors to watch are Kerrigan Bryne, Cindy Stark, Cyndi St. Aubin, and Mikki Kells.

Stephanie, thank you so much for having me. Your research into romance readers was fascinating and I hope others will check out why romance has such a huge and loyal following.


You can find out more about Tiffinie and her fiction on her website:  www.tiffiniehelmer.com
Tiffinie's latest release is described below.  Tiffinie has offered to give away a book, so the first person to send me a request on my contact form will receive a copy of BAIT.  UPDATE:  The giveaway book has been claimed!

In the wilds of Alaska, Assistant District Attorney Shyla Pierce is supposed to be dead, killed in the pursuit of justice. But in fact she is very much alive, quietly in hiding and slowly recovering from her near-fatal injuries. Meanwhile, deep in mourning for Shyla, Alaska State Trooper Judd Iverson tries and fails to move on. He’s forced to take a leave of absence. But when he arrives at his secluded fishing cabin, he’s shocked when Shyla opens the door. With a killer still on the loose and their passion unextinguished, they must relearn to trust each other and figure out how to catch the man who meant to kill Shyla the first time around.

 

Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Bait-Short-Story-Tiffinie-Helmer-ebook/dp/B00HNUN6M4/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1391720083&sr=1-3&keywords=tiffinie+helmer