Today it gives the Speculative Fiction Showcase great pleasure to interview Gideon Marcus, whose YA new release, Kitra, we featured on April 1st.
Galactic Journey is a finalist for Best Fanzine in the 2020 Hugo Awards announced on April 7, and has been nominated twice before. Congratulations! Can you tell us a little about Galactic Journey, what it is and what it does? In your bio, you describe it as a “historical web project” - what’s it all about?
Thank you so much! I'm always a little taken aback when we make the ballot. We are lucky to have so many great readers along with us on the Journey.
Galactic Journey is more than a fanzine -- it's a portal to 55 years ago, day by day. We started out in 2013 as a review site for science fiction magazines, and since I am a professional space historian specializing in the robotic probes of the late 50s, I also covered the space shots.
Our scope very quickly expanded. To understand the science fiction of the time in context, you have to appreciate the whole of the period. The politics, the music, the fashion...everything. Plus, from the start, we focused on marginalized voices: women, persons of color, LGBTQIA+, partly because their contributions tend to be forgotten in 2020, and partly because their works stand out both in content and quality. Science fiction was and is global, too. So as the number of Journey writers grew, so did our coverage. We now have authors from the UK, Russia, Australia, and our demographics are extremely diverse.
The Journey is not just a historical project -- in our coverage of the past, we always have an eye toward relevance to the future. After all, it's a modern audience that reads it, and we often spotlight issues that are significant to the 21st Century. But at the same time, we also try to preserve our in-the-minute mentality to keep the experience authentic. It's a really fine tightrope, but I think we've managed!
You describe Kitra as a Young Adult Space Adventure. What does that mean to you - and to your readers?
Back in the mid-20th Century, folks like Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton wrote "juveniles." These were stories aimed at teenagers but enjoyed by all ages. That's because they didn't talk down to their audience; they simply made sure that younger people could understand the works, too.
Those stories were usually positive in tone, emphasizing resourcefulness and persistence. And they almost invariably involved some kind of space exploration because space was "the final frontier."
I feel we've lost a lot of this in the current "YA" landscape, which dwells mostly in the realms of dystopia, post-apocalyptic, high fantasy or urban fantasy. The dividing line between teen and adult literature is more sharply defined. And space is an almost forgotten setting, or else the story is farcical or science fantasy.
Kitra is an attempt to bring back hard space-based science fiction for a younger audience, with the adventure, the excitement, and the fun, but also a serious, realistic tone.
The cover art is stunning. Can you tell us about your protagonist, Kitra Yilmaz; who she is and where she is headed?
Thank you! We really wanted to do right by Kitra and give her the cover she deserved. :)
At the start of the book, Kitra is 19, an orphan with a passion for the stars. Her mother was an important ambassador, and she left behind (metaphorical) shoes that Kitra despairs of being able to fill. That's why Kitra stakes her entire inheritance, including her beloved sailplane, on buying a salvage starship.
It's a pretty headstrong thing to do, but that's Kitra.
The book is also about the idea of a “found family”. What is at the root of this idea and why is it so important now - what resonates with readers and other audiences?
Family is a strange, malleable concept. From 1950-1965, the era that Galactic Journey is just finishing, the nuclear family was upheld as ideal -- despite the fact that it's a pretty unnatural concept. Before 1950, extended family was the norm. After 1965, once women were able to assert their rights to autonomy in matters of marriage, employment, and sex, and after the post-war economic boom led to stagflation followed by anemic growth, the strongly gender-roled nuclear family simply became untenable. Single parents, broken homes, even old-fashioned generation gaps frequently now make for strained family situations. As a result, friends are becoming the new family. People with common interests and goals. They can often understand and support you better than any blood relations.
I don't think Kitra would even have dreamed of embarking on her quest had she not had a group of very good friends that would make a natural crew. Marta, her ex-girlfriend, is a biologist and vital for keeping a ship's life support working. Marta's current partner, Peter, is a gifted engineer (though whether Kitra can actually convince him to get into a ramshackle vessel is another problem entirely!) Fareedh is new to the group, but his computer (sayar) skills are top-notch. And then there's Pinky, the blob-like alien, who has been Kitra's best friend since childhood.
Kitra is not the story of a single heroine taking on the universe. It's about how she and her found family work together to overcome the biggest crisis of their lives. Indeed, Kitra can't really mature as a character until she can knit her friends into a crew.
On the day of the release, you talked about the story being “a timely book, involving themes of isolation that everyone can identify with. It’s also a hopeful one where teamwork and ingenuity can save the day.” How important is this in our changed and troubling circumstances?
I did not plan the release for this novel to be so on-point with what's going on right now. The parallels are eerie. You've got a small group trapped in a confined space with limited resources, surrounded by a hostile environment. They're not responsible for their predicament, but they've only got themselves to rely on to get out of it.
If that doesn't resonate with this new age of isolation and social distance, I don't know what does!
And right now, I don't think people want to escape their modern-day dystopia into even darker dystopias. I want Kitra's message to inspire and motivate, to say that working together, keeping our heads, we can make it through the toughest times. The greatest praise I'm hoping for is someone telling me that my book kept them going through it all.
How has Covid-19 affected you as a writer, a publisher and someone who is passionate about books vintage and contemporary?
Well, it certainly made me rethink sales strategy! I run Journey Press, a publishing house. Our first book was Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963), kind of a natural fit for Galactic Journey. It ended up being a surprisingly good seller (maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, given the subject matter and the quality of the stories) and by March 13, it was in 330 bookstores across the US. We were doing so well with physical sales that I didn't focus much on digital sales.
Now the bookstores are all closed. I'm working with them as best I can, scheduling virtual author signings and such, but until the doors open, they're an outlet on hold.
So I'm learning to connect with people online, meeting a lot of wonderful folks I didn't have the bandwidth to find before.
As for reconciling the modern crisis with the 1965 world I spend much of my time in, one of the reasons I chose a 55 year gap is the resonance between that time and today. I often describe it as "our world, only crappier." It's recognizable. And in 1965 as in 2020, there was an increasing feeling of malaise, that society was going the wrong way. We got daily body count totals on the evening news, except back then, the killer wasn't a virus -- it was a war in Vietnam. It's not an exact fit; it never is. But as (someone who probably wasn't) Mark Twain observed, "History doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes."
What do you think Science Fiction particularly offers in a dystopian present?
Science Fiction is about extrapolation, "if this goes on." It can be, and for a long time has been, really dark. Part of it is we all want to be the one with the great cautionary tale for the ages, the next 1984 or Handmaid's Tale (by the way, Sonya Dorman essentially wrote the first incarnation of the latter in 1964). But it's become so facile to engage in what I call "angsturbation" these days. It doesn't all have to be edgy, or cynical, or snarky.
Because science fiction also is about hopeful futures, about people using technology to improve situations, about exploring what family, friendship, being human means. The original Star Trek, one of the few true Science Fiction television shows, inspired a host of inventions and thousands of scientists and engineers, not to mention bringing women into the genre in droves. Its utopian setting is often chided today as naive, but I guarantee Trek buoyed a lot of spirits ground down by the darkest parts of the 60s.
I don't have the hubris to say Kitra will be the Star Trek of the 21st Century (that's probably The Expanse :) ), but I hope it can be as inspirational to a new generation of fans.
Tell us more about your non-fiction writing and how it led to writing fiction.
It's actually the other way around. My Dad, who gave me my love of SF, always wanted to be a Science Fiction writer. I think he managed to write exactly one story before he died quite young. I've been writing fiction since I was 14. I turned in a story for extra credit in my math class, sophomore year. Throughout the day, people kept telling me how much they liked it, which surprised me because how would they know? Turns out the teacher read it aloud the next period!
My brother also wrote a lot of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and when I was 20, I helped him finish what I thought was a decent book called What is a Demon? It got an impressive number of rejections. :)
I gave up on fiction for a while, becoming a space historian in 2006 specifically because my History of Science grad school professor told me that I'd never make a good historian. He said I "lacked the proper philosophical underpinnings." He showed me!
Then I was a journalist for a couple of years, then a law clerk, then I wrote a lot of copy while I was running a software company. But I've always wanted to write fiction. Galactic Journey was sort of a transition point, non-fictional writing by a fictional me.
After I started the Journey, whenever I was between jobs, I'd always crank out a bunch of stories. Some remain in the desk, many made it onto long lists, some made it into print. Kitra started out as a novella, and not a very good one. Many revisions and expansions later, I think I've found the beautiful sculpture that was under all that marble.
The book has illustrations by Lorelei E. Marcus - tell us about them.
I grew up reading the Wizard of Oz books and novels of the period. They all had these great pictures illustrating key scenes. That's something you just don't see anymore. Also, most of the SF mags I read (in 1965, natch) have great interior art.
As it turns out, our daughter is quite a talented artist. She ought to be; she's been studying and improving diligently for a decade now. So I asked her if she'd be interested in producing pictures for the book.
She did a great job, and being able to see my characters realized visually on the page is just the coolest thing. Plus, my wife (Janice) edited the book, and she'll be reading the audiobook. Kitra is really a family effort, which is neat.
You mention the “diverse, realistic” characters in Kitra. What does this mean to you and why is it important?
My daughter paid me a great compliment the other day. She said she loved how the book showcases the importance and value of diversity without ever explicitly beating you over the head with it. Kitra is bisexual. So's Marta. That's just a fact. I don't use the word "bisexual;" it's just obvious in context.
Both Kitra and Fareedh are of Middle Eastern extraction. Their skin is dark. The strong white guy isn't the hero (though he has some heroic qualities, I think). Marta's the beautiful one. She's also the heavy one. Pinky's an alien: asexual, weird-looking.
I didn't specifically pick diverse characters, not really. They say "write what you know," and I'm queer, and my mother was born in the Middle East. But I'm hoping that people reading the book will like seeing ethnicities and backgrounds that haven't really made the foreground until recently.
Most importantly, I hope readers see Kitra and her crew simply as people (and that includes Pinky). Their nature informs who they are as characters, but it's their fundamental person-hood that is most important, that's universal.
With the coronavirus lockdown in place across the world, what are you watching and what are you reading? Is there time?
Oh sure. I have to keep up to date on 1965, which fills a lot of my dance card. Every month, it's Fantasy and Science Fiction (better since Avram Davidson left the editorship), Analog (Campbell needs to leave the editorship), and Galaxy. I also read a couple of period fiction books each month. Given the time and opportunity, I voraciously read nonfiction -- also usually period stuff.
But I also follow the current news, which isn't always the best for my mental well-being. We watch a lot of anime (we just finished Violet Evergarden, a beautiful, wonderful treatment of PTSD), but most of the TV we watch is period. Lorelei and I watch Burke's Law every Wednesday, and on Friday nights, it's Danger Man, followed by Password, then Rocky & Bullwinkle. When Bonanza comes on, we turn off the set.
(if that sounds confusing, understand that our house is in a time bubble. We have TV and radio stations that play stuff from exactly 55 years ago.)
How do you think the year 2020 will be remembered fifty-five years in the future?
Well, I'm kind of hoping I'll still be doing the Journey fifty-five years from now and lapping myself! I hope we learn from this year as a cautionary tale. In many ways we've recently traded progress for racist populism, sacrificed a lot of our country's great institutions (although, of course, when you look closely, there's never been a Golden Age. There are always worms underneath the disturbed rock.) These are the times that test souls. I like to think we'll come out of it like tempered steel, stronger and better for it. That's the lesson I've gotten from living in the past. Things are hard. They get better, if we work at it.
WorldCon and the Hugo Awards will take place online this year, which sounds both exciting and challenging. And possibly fun! What are your thoughts?
Worldcon used to cost $2 a ticket, although travel was more expensive back in the day. The cost of attending Worldcon is so prohibitive these days that it's become exclusionary. A cheaper, more easily attended Worldcon can help democratize the institution.
On the other hand, I do worry for those disabled in ways that make computer use difficult. There's also something lost in the lack of physical proximity. It's a great opportunity, but like you said: challenging.
Your short story, Andy and Tina, an alternate history, is the lead tale in the Sidewise-nominated anthology, Tales from Alternate Earths 2. Can you tell us about that?
Andy and Tina directly evolved from my space history work. Early in the 2000s, I developed a game called "Sputniks." It was a simulation of the Space Race with each superpower represented by teams of five, done in turns that spanned six months of historical time. We would meet once or twice a year, and I'd run the teams through a year or two, wherein they dynamically wrote a timeline through their decisions.
In the Sputniverse, the Soviets made it to the Moon a few months after the Americans. Bobby Kennedy won in '68 and got us out of Vietnam. Gus Grissom made the first small step/giant leap. Andrian Nikolaev took the second.
Andy and Tina is set in the Sputniverse in that alternate 1970 and stars Valentina Tereshkova. Interspersed with the scenes, I've got snippets of a rock opera by The Kinks about Tereshkova and Nikolaev's marriage. They never wrote it in our timeline, but it seemed something they might do in that one. Anyway, it's kind of a somber piece, very hard science fiction, but I really like the ending. I've got another story mostly written, in the same universe, called Flight of the Pegasus.
Have you more books or short stories to come? And what next for Galactic Journey?
Galactic Journey will keep plowing ahead, day by day. We'll cover Star Trek when it comes out next year. We'll watch the unfolding careers of new voices like Ursula K. LeGuin and Samuel R. Delany. I'm looking forward to Octavia Butler. I'm also enjoying revisiting the works of Larry Niven, which I grew up on.
Journey Press has got a whole line-up planned. In June, we're releasing Tom Purdom's 1964 classic, I Want the Stars, which (I believe) is the first SF novel to star a person of color. Next year, we're coming out with Rosel George Brown's Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue, corresponding with its debut in 1966. Janice has a got a high fantasy gay romance called The Eighth Key coming out late this year. We'll have more volumes of Rediscovery, eventually covering 30 years of science fiction.
As for me, my story Home Insurance is coming out in the Simultaneous Times podcast sometime this year. I've got an 8500 word story called Clairvoyage that's never been able to find a home, though I think it's the best thing I've ever written, inspired by Cordwainer Smith (one of the best authors no one has ever heard of). It's an awkward length for modern magazines, and maybe too literary. At some point, it's going to be the anchor story for a collection called Clairvoyages, but I'd love it to see print before then.
I'm working on a gay romance set on a B-17 bomber in World War 2 called Closer than Brothers. And Lorelei and I have teamed up to do a daily post/photo story about life during the Coronavirus, disguised as a silly science fiction story. Those are my fun work. :)
Most importantly, there will be more stories in the Kitra saga. I've plotted it out for ten books, actually -- one four book arc and a subsequent six book arc. They'll all stand alone, of course, but the total story will be pretty epic.
But every journey begins with a single step, and every series starts with a successful debut novel. I hope people love reading Kitra and want to see more. I certainly want to write the rest of her story!
Thanks so much for the opportunity to share a bit of the behind-the-scenes on Galactic Journey and Kitra. It's really been a lot of fun!
About Gideon Marcus:
Gideon Marcus is the founder of the Serling Award-winning and twice Hugo-nominated historical web project, Galactic Journey, Gideon Marcus is a science fiction writer and space historian. His alternate history story, Andy and Tina, is the lead tale in the Sidewise-nominated anthology, Tales from Alternate Earths 2. He lives in the San Diego area with his wife and their prodigy daughter as well as a matched pair of cats.
