I know Cat from conventions and the local coffeshop. I also know her writing and love it. I’m completely biased and I really enjoyed the Near + Far collection.
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My favorite thing about Near + Far is that I was worried at one point that I couldn’t write SF. I’ve never been a sciencey person. I like reading about it, but when it comes to numbers and metals and periodic weights, a little part of my head goes wandering off into the forest, gathering daisies, until the numbers have gone away.
But one of the cool things about science fiction is that it’s social science too, and that’s an area that interests me greatly. Some of my favorite books fall into this view, like Joan Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean, Kay Kenyon’s The Braided World, or Louise Marley’s The Terrorists of Irustan. That’s where I went when I wrote science fiction, into mental rather than material science.
So there are space stations, but not much explanation of how they recycle their waste or what they’re powering their solenoids on. There’s war and biological weapons, but not much about the underpinnings of that. It’s a little nerve wracking, because sometimes one thinks that to write science fiction, you must understand science fact.
And certainly science can inspire stories – a piece a friend posted about the impervious nature of plastic in our oceans ended up shaping “The Mermaids Singing, Each to Each,” while biological engineering underlies other stories, like “RealFur” or “VocoBox.” But in each, the science is only a secondary character – it’s what people do and think and say that matter in the stories, that move them along.
I’d always thought of myself as primarily a fantasy writer – both The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories as well as Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight are both chockfull of nothing but fantasy. But when I sat down and started compiling stories, I realized I had a lot more science fiction than I had originally thought. And that made me happy. Because I wanted to be an SF writer, to follow in the footsteps of the SF writers who’d shaped my reading growing up: Samuel R. Delany, Robert Heinlein, and Andre Norton, more than anyone else. I might not be able to operate a slide rule in a way Heinlein would approve of, but I could create a story that referenced his and talked about some of the things in it that bothered me. I was one of the gang, with just as much right to speak science fiction as the rest of them.
I’m still timorous around those who speak in numbers, those who understand the mysteries of subatomic particles or string theory. But I feel a bit more confident with this book in joining the conversation. I’m an SF writer too, dammit, and I’ve got the book to prove it. 😉
