Breaking Down Walls

2024 marks twenty years of MOPOP’s stewardship of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and in that time we’ve been lucky enough to celebrate the induction of three local creators: Dreamsnake author Vonda McIntyre in 2018, Arrival author Ted Chiang in 2020, and now speculative fiction author and activist Nicola Griffith, who joins the class of 2024 alongside bestselling Nigerian American Africanfuturist author Nnedi Okorafor. 

Best known for the Hild Sequence, Ammonite (named #25 on Esquire’s “75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time” list), So Lucky, Slow River, and Spear, Nicola Griffith’s work has been awarded the Nebula Award, Otherwise/Tiptree Award, World Fantasy Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, two Washington State Book Awards, and six Lambda Literary Awards.     

Griffith shared her reaction to joining the Hall of Fame on her blog, then generously joined MoPOP for an interview to discuss her career, thoughts on science fiction and genre, craft techniques, hopes for the future, and recommendations for readers. 

You can learn more about Griffith’s work at her website: https://nicolagriffith.com/ 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

OPENING 

First of all, congratulations! We’re so excited to have another Northwest creator join the Science Fiction & Fantasy Hall of Fame. You’ve been publishing award-winning books and stories since 1988 and are very much still going; do you have any thoughts on gaining Hall of Fame-status at this moment in your career? 

I was absolutely gobsmacked when I got that email. I was astounded. Just look at the people I'm joining . . . they were gods to me as a teen. Those who know me, whether through social media or in real life, know that I don't really do humble—I'm ******* good at what I do—but to be in this company, it made me feel this thing, this weird, unfamiliar thing that might, just maybe, be humble. So that was a surprise. 

It was a surprise, too, because until Spear, I’d done nothing book-length labeled and marketed as SFF since Slow River, unless you count editing Bending the Landscape. Even that, the third volume of which came out in 2001, was more than two decades ago. But I think of all my books as speculative fiction because they are focalized heterotopias, which you'll understand if you’ve read my PhD. 

The Hild sequence, for example, uses all the tools of science fiction: world-building, cognitive estrangement, and so on. But more specifically, it requires readers with the kind of skills that are largely learned when engaging with science fiction. It's a willingness to just go with the flow, to not necessarily have to understand immediately what it is that you're reading, but for the meaning to gradually become clear in context. That's the kind of reader I was relying on. My readers need to commit; hey need to just give it up to the book—and I learned that strategy through reading and writing science fiction. Hild wouldn't be possible without the literature of science fiction, even though there isn't a bit of fantastika in there. 

GENRE 

In that PhD thesis, you state: “I draw from diverse traditions and genres, including historical fiction, lesbian fiction, science fiction, crime fiction, literary fiction, and nature writing. . .” Did you set out to write as broadly as you have, across time (past, present, future) as well as genres? 

My work is often prompted by trying to answer a question. In my teens and early twenties I read so much science fiction, and so many reviews and critical studies of that science fiction, particularly women-only worlds, underneath which was this—sometimes actually spoken aloud but usually subliminal—question: Is a women-only world possible? Because are women really human? And so I wrote Ammonite to find out what a world of women would be like. And you can't do that without science fiction, which is why my first novel was SF.  

And then the second book was more about trying to wrestle with the notion of an essential self. By that I mean, are we born who we are, unchanging, and it doesn't matter in what era or under what circumstances? And because I had just written science fiction, was thinking in science fictional terms, it seemed easy to stay in that mode. Plus I had this really nifty idea about pollution remediation and sustainability. But then after that the questions I had for a while were not questions that needed science fiction to answer. 

One of the reasons I'm writing historical fiction now is to answer the question Has the world and its hierarchies always been this way? Have women—and queer and disabled folk, people of color—always been marginalized the way historians tell us we have? And I don't think so. I think the received story of the past is wrong and I’m going to write a better one. 

So, yeah, the genre really depends on the question and the goal. 

You touched on that directly in your thesis when you said, “For me, genre is a tool, a vehicle to traverse specific story terrains.” Given the focus of this Hall of Fame award, are science fiction and fantasy fields where you feel especially inspired or at home as a writer? 

In terms of science fiction and the science fiction community, I’ve always felt as though I occupied this weird liminal space. On the one hand, I really am a native of science fiction and fantasy. I speak the language of SF. People at conventions are my people. I feel as though they know me, and I know them, and I belong. But outside that in-person, book-based bubble I’d always assumed that the casual science fiction consumer—whether books or comics or film or TV—didn't know I existed. Because that's one of the oddnesses of writing what I write. Although I've won literally dozens, I mean at least two dozen regional, national, and international awards, I've never really achieved critical mass. It's because all these awards are from different literary categories, different walled gardens. Readers in one garden don’t know the other gardens exist. 

Do you think that categorization has impacted how science fiction and fantasy have been viewed in the wider pop culture? They both seem to have achieved significant popular acceptance over the last 40 or so years. 

Looking at the pop cultural aspect, I think fantasy was a best-selling product in book form long before science fiction because it was less demanding of the reader. I think it's the same reason that science fiction on screen, whether we're talking blockbuster movies or TV series, was much more popular than in books, because it's cognitively easier. But the world is different now. The world is — going back to what I was saying at the beginning about my work relying on the skills that science fiction readers learn early—becoming a science fictional world. More and more people now don't need a book of instructions to deal with a new piece of technology, a new phone, a different operating system. They pick it up and think, OK, well, I've dealt with this category of device/OS before; I understand the possible parameters; I’ve learnt how to learn how to use it. It’s that science fictional willingness to just figure things out as you go.  And I think that is one of the reasons that science fiction is becoming ubiquitous, because the skills and essential approach have been built in over the last few decades. Everyone behaves as a science fiction reader in a particular way now, I think. 

CRAFT 

Your thesis also discusses the importance of grounding story in physical detail, particularly of the body and natural world: “An embodied character’s exploration of her natural surrounding lies at the heart of my primary joy as a writer.” Do you remember when you came to this understanding? Would you consider immersive sensory detail a core element of your work regardless of subject or genre? How would you describe its impact? 

In terms of the immersiveness, it's about the specific sensory details which trigger something called mirror neurons. I want to trigger mirror neurons in order to create narrative empathy. Basically, to make the reader feel what the character feels. 

Mirror neurons are brain cells activated both when we perform actions and when we see others perform them. If you hook your brain up to a functional MRI and watch me do something, the same pathways in your brain will light up as you watch me as they do in my brain while I'm actually doing it. The observer is in a very particular way actually performing not just observing. And the more specific the sensory detail a writer uses, the more easily your mirror neurons are triggered. And when the reader’s mirror neurons are triggered, they are literally recreating the character inside themselves. It's not that I’m putting the reader inside the character, I am persuading the reader to put the character inside themselves. It's a fantastical thing, almost like magic, a kind of possession. You can be a middle-aged straight man reading about a teenage bisexual girl and you will be feeling and thinking what she is thinking and feeling. And because it’s you thinking and feeling those things you will understand them. And because you understand them, you won't hate them. I don't think there can be anyone who's read more than one of my books all the way through that can say that they don't understand what it's like to be queer, or a woman, or afraid, or sometimes to kill people, depending.  

That really is where everything comes from for me: the body and sensory detail. And then the need to answer a question. What would really happen if? How would it really be? Are these people really the way we've been told? Et cetera, et cetera. For me this is where we—as conscious beings, or as characters in fiction—come from: the interface between the body and the world. 

[Note: Griffith discussed mirror neurons in depth during her June 2024 Town Hall Seattle talk on the Queer Medieval, which you can watch on her blog.] 

HOPES & GOALS 

What would you like to see from science fiction and fantasy in the coming decades? Do you have any hopes for the future of either genre, or for your own unfolding career? 

Honestly, if I had one goal purely for myself, it would be to break down those walls between my literary gardens so that my next book isn't ‘science fiction.’ It's not a ‘fantasy.’ It's not ‘historical fiction’ or a ‘novel of suspense.’ It is ‘the New Nicola Griffith.' And people buy it because it's a Nicola Griffith book and they don't care whether it's set in the past or the future or a place that never was, or whether someone dies or undertakes a harrowing psychological journey. I want a reader to buy it because I wrote it.  

That’s my goal for me, and for the field as well: the breaking down of those walls. I think the world is already heading that way in terms of SFF. I mean, the number of books that back in the day would have been considered lesser because they’re a genre work that are now being longlisted, shortlisted, and even winning major literary prizes... That's where the world is going.  

RECOMMENDATIONS 

Whose science fiction and fantasy work would you recommend for those who love yours? Who should be taking their place in the Hall of Fame next year? 

I would like to see Suzy McKee Charnas in the Hall of Fame. She was a contemporary of Vonda McIntyre and Russ and Tiptree. She wrote the Holdfast Chronicles, and as a writer she was fearless, utterly unflinching. I've just written an introduction to a new edition of The Vampire Tapestry that I think will be out either the end of this year or beginning of next. Charnas completely changed vampire fiction. She also wrote the very first novel that I know of with no men in it at all. She was a great writer. And her influence . . . Think of her as the SF equivalent of the Velvet Underground. They might not have sold a lot of albums, but a huge percentage of people who bought one of those albums formed a band that did sell a lot. She's like that—more influential than first appears. I think a lot of people owe quite a bit to Suzy Charnas. 

For those who like my books, who else might they enjoy? I would say Kate Atkinson—also from Yorkshire, also with a science-fictional mind. And if you like the Hild books, or at least the Early Medieval north, then Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf translation—it’s not like any other, more a thrillingly modern but capturing-the- essence interpretation of the original, as Christopher Logue’s All Day Permanent Red does with Homer. Elizabeth A. Lynn. Both her science fiction, like A Different Light, and fantasy, such as the Chronicles of Tornor. And Jo Walton, she has a wonderful range. Rivers Solomon is doing some very interesting things. 

But I think if I could persuade people to read one person right now, it would be—and I’m not even going to attempt to persuade you not to think this is straight up bias on my part, you’ll believe me or you won’t—Kelley Eskridge, my wife. She is the best short story writer I know. She's published one collection, Dangerous Space, with eight stories in it, and one novel, Solitaire. Out of those nine pieces she’s had published, two have been produced for the screen— Solitaire became the film OtherLife and you can watch on Prime Video now.  

She is so very good. The reason that far too few know who she is, is that I have MS. Chronic, degenerative illness and disability are expensive in this country. Somebody in the family has to have a corporate job to make life possible. So Kelley has a full-time job, and she has a wife with MS that she has to do a lot for. She doesn't have time to write. So another thing I would like to see for science fiction and fantasy moving forward is some kind of serious grant-making body to make it possible not just for super cool literary types, not just young writers or new writers to get the meaningful, life-changing awards, but SF people to get some, too, and be free, for a while, to write.  

CLOSING 

Is there anything else you’d like to share with MOPOP’s members, fans, and visitors? 

If I could add one thing, it would be to address the anxiety of influence that people have and seem to often revert to. Writers are often asked, Who are your influences? or Where do you come from? And so we riffle madly through our memory and pick the most prestigious person that comes immediately to mind. And because of the way the world works, almost every time that prestigious person will be a man. The women who have influenced a lot of people get left behind. And so I would like to suggest to people that if they ever talk about books, make sure at least half the books they mention are by and, just as importantly, about women—and disability, queerness, transness, poverty, class, all those things that render people less visible in the world. But the original and still probably most basic differential is women and men. But I’ve ranted about this elsewhere (“Taking the Russ Pledge”). 

Thank you for the time. This has been an absolute joy, and we are so excited to have the chance to celebrate another local! 

Thank you! It's my pleasure. I love to talk about and evangelize for the genre because I love it. 

Related Articles: 

•  MOPOP's Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame Inductees 2024

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