Pamela Sargent
The Millennium Interview

December 2000-April 2001

Jill Engel-Cox: It has been over 10 years since we conducted our first interview-by-mail, done by snail mail then, email now. Since then, there have been rapid changes in communication and electronic technologies. How have these changes influenced your writing, both in physical technique and in style and content?

Pamela Sargent: I don't think they've changed my methods or my writing all that much, but that may be only because my habits were largely set before I ever had a computer. I wrote my first drafts by hand when I started writing and still do that for most of my work. I kept using a manual typewriter even after most of my writer colleagues had gone on to electric and electronic typewriters, so I got used to more primitive methods. And for many years, I was enough of a technophobe to have friends ask me why I didn't just use a brush and papyrus, or chisels and stone tablets. I got past that, and now I find myself much more interested in computers and their associated technologies and applications than I ever expected to be.

New technology has saved me some busywork–not having to photocopy as much, not having to retype large number of drafts to incorporate revisions–but even here, my habits are set. Fred Pohl has often offered the following advice to authors: When you've finished a draft, print it out and then delete the file–from your hard disk, backups, everything–and then start over, reentering as you rewrite. Otherwise, you just get lazy, contenting yourself with touching things up when maybe what you should be doing is a total overhaul. It's excellent advice, and I follow it 90 per cent of the time. Sometimes you really do have to throw everything out and start over.

As for content, everything changes content. Life experience does, getting older does, and new technologies probably have affected my content to some degree. But since I usually begin writing something largely out of unconscious impulses, I'm often the last to know what has brought a particular work into existence.

JE: Let’s start with the novels you have written since our last interview. Your 1993 novel, Ruler of the Sky (a historical novel about Genghis Khan told from the viewpoint of the women in his life) was a departure for you from more traditional science fiction. What inspired you to take a new direction mid-career?

PS: A long-held interest in the subject, followed by a chance to actually write the book. My editor at Crown, Lisa Healy, who bought and worked with me on my 1986 novel The Shore of Women, wanted another book from me, but not necessarily science fiction, and so did my British editors, Carmen Callil and Alison Samuel, at Chatto & Windus. They didn't see The Shore of Women as only a science fiction novel, but as a book with a much wider appeal. When I proposed Ruler of the Sky to them, they leaped at it, but the fact is that I was nurturing the idea of such a book for a long time. I had even proposed writing a young adult novel about the young Temujin, before he became Genghis Khan, but my editor at what was then Harper & Row had her doubts about that, maybe because a teenaged Genghis Khan didn't seem like a great role model for younger readers. She probably did me a favor by turning my proposal down, since that left me open to revamping it for Crown and Chatto.

Art by Ron Miller

Also, to be honest, I've always wanted to write as many different kinds of things as possible. Against all the wisdom of the marketplace, I persist in believing that writers should not limit themselves to only one form. Science fiction is appealing because the category encompasses so many different kinds of writing and writers. I've often wished that more people, especially readers, were aware of that fact.

JE: What was the response from your readers to Ruler of the Sky?

PS: Generally positive and I think it would have been even more positive if the novel had received more promotion. Unfortunately, I lost my editor at Crown; Lisa left to take another job, and then her hand-picked successor to edit Ruler also left, and I ended up in the hands of two successive editors who hadn't bought my novel, didn't really understand it, and had nothing to gain from promoting it. So there was no promotion; my book had become what they call an orphan in the trade.

In the face of that disappointment, which was tremendous–Lisa Healy had firmly believed that Ruler of the Sky would be my "breakthrough" novel to a much wider audience–it's been gratifying that those readers the book managed to acquire responded so well. I still get letters and email messages from people who have read Ruler, and a young producer/director in the movie industry, who called me up some time ago after reading it and loving it, keeps hoping to make a film or TV miniseries about it some day.

JE: Your 1998 novel, Climb the Wind, is an alternative history of native Americans. How did your research for Ruler of the Sky prepare you for Climb the Wind?

PS: Climb the Wind was a novel that grew almost involuntarily. While I was writing Ruler of the Sky, and feeling almost as though I was living in the time of my Mongol characters, I was struck by a remark of Louis L'Amour's. This prolific author of Westerns commented, in an interview, that our history would have been very different had there been an American Indian Genghis Khan. I filed that comment away, and around that time–this was the early 1990s–was asked by Greg Benford if I could contribute a story about an alternate America to a anthology he was editing with Marty Greenberg (What Might Have Been, Volume 4: Alternate Americas, edited by Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg, Bantam, 1992.)

I ended up writing a long story, "The Sleeping Serpent," for that anthology, based on the assumption that the Mongols had ended up conquering all of Europe and had then moved on to the New World. Had Genghis Khan's successor Ogedei not died in 1241, which led to the Mongols withdrawing their forces from much of eastern Europe so that their commanders could return to their homeland to choose a new Khan, they might have taken everything up to the Atlantic coast, and our history would have been entirely different. For my story, I had the Mongols cross the Atlantic, settle on Manhattan Island, and send an expedition up the Hudson River. My home turf is Albany, New York, so this enabled me to set a story in a familiar setting and put some Mongol characters in the same story with a few of my Mohawk ancestors.

Art by Ron Miller

Perhaps more important, writing "The Sleeping Serpent" gave me my first experience in writing an alternate history, a form that requires as much research as a historical novel along with a pronounced awareness of how contingent history is, how easily things might have gone another way. Without that experience, I doubt I would have been able to do Climb the Wind properly. One major problem with alternate history tales is that it's very easy to write something completely gratuitous, the "what if Napoleon had a B-52 at Waterloo?" kind of story. Gardner Dozois calls this sort of story "a fantasy story with an all-star cast." It might be entertaining, but it doesn't really have much to say.

That temptation was certainly there with Climb the Wind. I began by imagining a kind of wish-fulfillment: what if the Plains Indians had been able to unite under a charismatic leader and conquer the eastern states, thus avenging the wrongs done to them? But alternative history has its own constraints, as does our so-called "real" history. The last part of the novel was more ambiguous and the victory of the Lakota and their allies more limited than I had originally intended.

JE: I find that last statement very interesting, as if you were not completely in control of your own writing, that the novel had taken over. Can you talk about that feeling a little more? When you're in the middle of a novel, what drives where it goes?

PS: In the case of Climb the Wind, logic and history imposed some constraints on my ending. I had thought that everything was moving toward an overwhelming military triumph and a big victory scene at the end, but even with the changed assumptions I incorporated into my story, it didn't seem likely that the still heavily outnumbered Lakota, even with the technological developments I allowed them, could have swept east and completely destroyed Washington. I'll admit that this had been my assumption when I started the novel, but the further along I got, the less likely it seemed.

Often–and this is usually the case with me–the characters drive the story and decide where a novel's going, and I may not see them clearly enough or understand their motivations enough until I'm well into writing the book. If I'm trying to pull the story in one direction, and the character is resisting me and insisting that isn't the way it should go, I'll listen to the character. That may sound strange, but I really do find myself with fictional characters who seem as real as the people I know in "real" life, who seem to exhibit volition, and if I try to force them to do something they wouldn't do for the sake of the plot or some other consideration, they'll resist me. To bend them to my will, I'm convinced, would make the story seem false, and whenever I've tried it, the story dies on me.

I'm not saying that this is the only way to write fiction. There are writers for whom the plot, or some other consideration, is paramount, and if they can make that work, good for them. But I have to hear and feel and understand the characters before I can really write the story, and after that they have as much to say about where it's headed as I do.

JE: Do you ever surprise yourself?

PS: All the time! Sometimes the ending turns out just as I thought it would, but I end up getting there in completely unexpected ways. Sometimes I have no idea where I'm going–that was certainly the case with The Shore of Women, for example, and also with an earlier novel, The Sudden Star. I have heard from a number of readers who have said that some of my plot twists were completely unexpected, and all I could think of to say was, "Well, damned if I wasn't just as shocked as you were."

JE: Does writing a science fiction novel feel different in this way (more restrictive, less, neither) than writing a historical novel?

PS: I would say that the main difference is that, in writing a historical novel, you're constrained by the facts of history. The historical novelist is allowed a little creative license; for example, you might move certain minor events around chronologically, or assume that a couple of characters who never met actually did meet for the sake of drama, or you might choose to make a particular character a bit older or younger than he actually was at a particular time. But you can't blatantly violate actual historical events. Things happened as they did.

What the novelist can do is provide motivations on the part of the characters, or try to imagine events that might have happened, events that don't contradict what actually took place. And you can add your own creations to the mix, fictional characters who didn't exist but who might have existed; historical novelists do that all the time, and writing novels that way gives the historical novelist more ability to create suspense, since even if the reader's familiar with the period, he won't know what's going to happen to those particular characters.

But even so, you already know that certain events have to happen. Your job is to imagine why things might have happened as they did, and to remember that they weren't inevitable at the time, however inevitable they might seem in retrospect.

Now obviously science fiction isn't as restrictive in that you can invent your own backgrounds and societies and then populate them entirely with your own characters. But even there, the assumptions that you build into your story, and the kinds of characters you imagine, will impose their own constraints. When anything can happen, nothing is interesting.

JE: Speaking of science fiction, this year, your long-awaited third book in the Venus trilogy, Child of Venus, has just been released. Why the publishing delay since Venus of Shadows (1988)?

PS: Believe me, it wasn't my decision. I was three hundred pages into Child of Venus in 1992 when, without warning, my editor called me and told me that they had cancelled the contract for my novel. I wasn't alone–other writers suffered the same sorts of cancellations of their projects at that time, and the same kind of wholesale purge has happened to writers since then at different publishing houses. Writing has never been an easy profession, and it's become much harder for many fine writers. Even so, the cancellation of Child of Venus was a devastating blow, and damned near wiped me out mentally. It would have been bad enough had I been three hundred pages into a novel that wasn't part of a trilogy, but to realize that my third Venus novel might never appear at all, after all the work on the other two, almost destroyed me.

A few months after this news, I won a Nebula Award for my novelette "Danny Goes to Mars," and I was such a basket case by then that I could not even attend the awards dinner to accept the award, my first in this field. By then, I was seriously wondering if my writing career was dead. And then I tried to put myself together, mainly by writing short fiction and, by doing so, rebuild my confidence that I could write anything at all.

Trying to sell Child of Venus to another publisher, I soon realized, was going to be tough. Offering the third volume of a trilogy to a publisher who has not published the first two is an offer most publishers can easily refuse. But I got lucky, because John Douglas, an editor who was interested in my work and supportive of it, decided to buy both Child of Venus and Climb the Wind when he went to HarperCollins as an editor. I assumed that I would be publishing Child of Venus first, but HarperCollins wanted to bring out Climb the Wind first, for various reasons, and that meant even more delay while I wrote that novel. Then, HarperCollins decided to buy Avon/William Morrow less than a year after Climb the Wind was published, and that meant adding all the Eos/Avon titles to the HarperCollins science fiction list. The overworked editors at Eos had to sort all that out. So, after all that, Child of Venus is being released in May 2001 from Eos, and there's a limited first signed edition from the Easton Press, too. Finally.

Pam's cat, Spencer, in the yard of their home
Photo by George Zebrowski

There is one benefit to such a long string of bad luck, though. You quickly find out who your real friends are, and I found out that I had more of them than I realized. A number of people were there for me, including John Douglas (without whom Child of Venus might not have see the light of day), my agent Richard Curtis–I could go on, but then I'd sound like a politician or an Oscar winner. I don't know if most readers care about the hard lives most writers have to lead, and maybe they shouldn't care, since the work itself is what counts. I've had people tell me that they would be happy to be published at all!

JE: How did you approach the book differently than you would have if you'd written it immediately after the others?

PS: I was able to think about it more, as I've said. I was also able to take advantage of a number of scientific works that weren't available earlier, one of the most important being a detailed volume on terraforming by Martyn Fogg, a British writer and researcher who may be the expert on that subject. And presumably I'd learned more about writing since finishing the first two volumes. But I'm not sure that I really approached Child of Venus differently. For example, I'd already decided that I wanted to tell the story pretty much entirely from the point-of-view of Mahala, the protagonist, even though the first two books used a number of different points-of-view. I knew what I wanted to do.

JE: Also, there is a time jump in the story from the second to the third book. Why did you choose to do that?

PS: The material dictated that decision. In other words, given that terraforming, if it's ever possible at all, would have to take place over very long periods of time, any story about terraforming has to take that into account. But another reason is that I wanted Child of Venus to be able to stand alone as a novel, as do Venus of Dreams and Venus of Shadows. It's very important to me that any reader picking up any of these novels by itself can read it without having to have read the others, although reading all of them should also have its rewards. And I wanted anybody who had read the first two books to be able to pick up the third and plunge right into it, so to speak. Having a large gap in time between the second and the third novel is one way of accomplishing this, of having the events of the first two become the background of a third novel that is complete in itself.

JE: One of the unique projects you have been involved in was writing the text of Firebrands, an art book illustrating women characters from science fiction novels. How did you get connected with the artist, Ron Miller?

PS: Actually, Ron got in touch with me. He had been doing paintings of some of his favorite science fiction and fantasy female characters for some years, and wanted to collect them in one volume. But he didn't want it to be only an art book; he wanted some text, to make it more substantial. He thought of asking me because of my Women of Wonder anthologies, and also because he had done a painting of my character Iris Angharads for the Easton Press "Masterpieces of Science Fiction" edition of Venus of Dreams.

I got interested partly because not much had been written about science fiction female characters, as opposed to women writers. Ron had also consulted with many of the authors who had created these heroines, including me, to make sure that his portraits of their characters were true to how the authors had seen them. Firebrands was really Ron's baby, but I was happy to be able to contribute to the project.

JE: Did you work from his illustrations, or did you prepare the text first?

PS: I worked from the illustrations–Ron sent me slides of most of them, even before we wrote up the proposal. This was back in the early 1990s, and it took a while to get a good publisher interested, as you can see by the fact that Firebrands wasn't published until the late 1990s. When we finally sold Firebrands to Paper Tiger, Ron selected the paintings that he wanted to use, since we couldn't include them all, and then I wrote my final text, which turned out to be a bit more complicated than just writing an essay, because the text had to work with and flow around the paintings and in places had to be trimmed or expanded because of the book's layout. While editing my final draft, I had to consult color page proofs that showed exactly how the paintings would be laid out in the final book. Both of us worked on the captions for the paintings.

Ron had to leave out a lot of paintings, and I couldn't mention every heroine–or every writer–that I would have liked to include in the text, but we haven't given up hope of doing a revised volume, or possibly an additional volume, in the future.

JE: In addition to your novels, you have also been editing many other books over the least 8 years, including three Nebula Award anthologies, two White Wolf Rediscovery books, and others. Do you enjoy editing?

PS: Editing is enjoyable, but in a very different way from writing. For my own writing, I've found that I have to shut off my inner critic entirely when writing first drafts; if you keep stopping to pass judgment on yourself, you'll never get past the first page. But with editing, that inner critic has to be participating in the whole process. I try to enjoy the story while analyzing it at the same time. Unfortunately, this makes it really hard for me to edit anthologies and write fiction at the same time. I can do it now, with some difficulty, but in my early years, I couldn't do it at all.

JE: How do you choose the stories?

PS: I wrote about the process I go through in Nebula Awards 31. In the introduction, I began by citing Vladimir Nabokov, who said that, the best temperament for a reader to have "is a combination of the artistic and the scientific one." Being a good reader, he claimed, required both rereading and a willingness to "get clear the specific world the author places at his disposal." Any editor or anthologist has to be primarily a good reader, and here's how I described the way I approached the task:

This was pretty much how I proceeded with all my anthologizing.

Maybe it also helps that I read a fair number of anthologies as a child. I might have picked up a few clues on how to edit unconsciously. I also worked on the editorial boards of school literary magazines and the like. The most painful lesson to learn is probably knowing what will have to be left out–contrary to what some writers may think, the editor may love a story yet not be able to include it for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes it's lack of space in the book. Sometimes it's because of that need for a kind of orchestration and sounding of different notes.

And by the time the anthology is published, I've usually read every story in it a number of times at every stage of seeing the book through to publication. When you're read a story seven or eight times in less than a year and still love it, you know it's good.

JE: When we last did our interview, you were having trouble convincing your publisher that there was enough interest in another Women of Wonder (WoW) volume. Since then, you have published 2 WoW anthologies, both excellent. What happened to make these books possible?

PS: Time passed, and Anne Freedgood, my editor on earlier anthologies, left my previous publisher (Vintage) and took a position at Harcourt. At the same time, two other editors at Harcourt, John Radziewicz and Michael Kandel, had expressed interest in the WoWs. I wrote to Anne, offered my proposal for a new WoW volume, she passed my proposal on, and Michael bought the project. He left Harcourt (temporarily) after that, but Harcourt editor Christa Malone worked with me on the two new WoWs. Christa was also the person handling the Nebula Awards anthologies then, and she did a terrific job on everything; she's the kind of editor who catches every tiny mistake and makes the kinds of suggestions that can greatly improve any book. I've been very lucky with the editors who worked with me on my anthologies.

JE: Do you think getting the two WoWs published reflects a change in the state of feminism?

PS: Maybe it only reflects changes in how people view the state of feminism and the women's movement. In the late 1980s, when I first proposed a new Women of Wonder anthology, there was a feeling in many circles that the movement was basically passé. In the 1990s, there was a renewed interest in the subject, and since then, it's become pretty clear that within science fiction, you can't discuss the history of the field without discussing the work of women. As for so-called women's issues, they've become mainstream issues in the developed world, which isn't to say they've been settled or that the battle's been won. And in much of the world, the position of most women is frightful and appalling. About the only hope I see is that more people are conscious of these inequities and the need to do something about them.

JE: What kind of reader response have you received from these books?

PS: Generally, it's been enthusiastic and supportive. Typically, I hear from readers who never thought of associating women with science fiction, or who never bothered to read science fiction because they assumed there was nothing of interest in it for them. The WoWs have apparently motivated many of these readers to seek out writers they might otherwise not have read, which was one purpose of the anthologies.

I think that most avid or long-term readers of science fiction, even the most obtuse and conservative, are well aware of the contributions of women writers by now, but I'm not so sure about readers unacquainted with the field. Maybe avid science fiction writers don't need such anthologies as much as those who don't know anything about the genre, who assume that it's largely Star Wars kinds of stories or techie tales for guys, and I still run into such readers.

JE: A decade ago, the science fiction world was into cyberpunk as its latest movement. Now, as more and more science fiction is being published as "mainstream", the field does not seem to have a clear new direction. What do you see as the status of the science fiction field today? What do you see as its future over the next 10 years? Over the next 100 years?

PS: What a question! I think everyone in the genre is wrestling with that one. The fact is that we're all going off in different directions, all of which are lumped together as science fiction largely because that's convenient for publishers. There's a certain kind of science fiction that seems to me to have become a kind of science fantasy instead–I don't mean that as a criticism, only as a description. I'm talking about the kind of writing that uses all the props of science fiction–spaceships, advanced technology, aliens, and the rest–to tell stories that seem to be our culture's version of adventure tales in exotic places. They can't be set in unexplored and unknown regions of Earth any more, so they're set in other parts of the universe instead, but you can't really call them serious extrapolations of the future.

Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski
Copyright by Jerry Bauer

Then there's the serious realistic sort of science fiction, written by writers as different from one another as Bruce Sterling, Nancy Kress, Greg Benford, Pat Cadigan, Kim Stanley Robinson, and George Zebrowski, for that matter, to name only a few. Then you have Harry Turtledove and the alternative history writers, the postmoderns, and the occasional Jonathan Lethem or Karen Joy Fowler who escapes the genre label altogether. And just to make matters even more confusing, you could classify several of Dean Koontz's or Michael Crichton's bestsellers as science fiction, too. What we have now is a group of subgenres, many of which should probably be considered other genres altogether.

Art by Ron Miller

My prediction, and maybe I should call it just a guess, or a shot in the dark, is that only a couple of strains of science fiction may actually survive under the science fiction label: the realistic extrapolative kind and the science fantasy variety. I'd bet largely on the science fantasy to end up being the only stuff that survives under the science fiction label, because that's the kind that is dominant in movies and on TV. The best of the realistic rigorous variety may only survive if some charismatic or dominant editorial force comes along to inspire such work and demand it from writers. People forget that major science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein were heavily influenced by John W. Campbell, or how much Michael Moorcock's editorial efforts at New Worlds in the 1960s affected the genre. There are still some good editors around, especially at the magazines, but almost no one with that kind of dominant influence, which I think may be needed at this point if the genre is to have any coherence.

Personally, I like going off in all directions myself, but it would be very bad for the genre in the long run if we lost the rigorous, "hard" science fiction--because that's the rich soil in which all the varieties grow, no matter how far they may have grown away from or branched out from their roots. Almost every science fiction writer has felt inadequate before the genre's demands and its unique challenges. There are some who would say that the form is a uniquely difficult one in which to write, with special demands, and they can make a good case for that. All we can do is the best we can.

JE: So, what are you working on now? What direction do you see yourself moving in over the next few years, as a writer and as an editor both within the science fiction field and outside of it?

PS: At the moment, I have two proposals for new novels out, both of which use the theme of time travel. Ever since H.G. Wells and The Time Machine, it seems almost obligatory for a science fiction writer to write at least one long work using that theme. I've written one story, and am working on another, set against my Venus background. I've got a short story collection, titled (at the moment, anyway) The Mountain Cage and Other Stories, coming out from Meisha Merlin Publishers sometime in 2002. I'm also putting together an anthology for DAW, Conqueror Fantastic, which will contain original historical fantasy stories featuring or concerning such historical figures as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Attila the Hun, Napoleon, Shaka Zulu, Stalin, or any other conqueror a contributor wants to write about. What will I be doing after that? A few years ago, I wasn't sure of what I'd be doing now, so I am wary of any long-term predictions, except to say that I will be writing, one way or another.