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Speculative in Seattle by Cat Rambo

With landmarks like the Space Needle, the Monorail and the EMP/Sci Fic Museum, or our stunning central library, Seattle is in many ways a fanciful, futuristic city. Not surprisingly, the city plays an important role in the world of speculative fiction and is home to a number of prominent female writers who, with Seattle as their inspiration, excel at spinning tales of alternate realities.

“Speculative fiction” is a broad term used to describe a wide range of genres that challenge our imaginations by speculating on what-ifs. It refers collectively to science fiction, fantasy and horror, but also encompasses other forms of fiction that depict life beyond the world as we know it. It refers to the kind of writing that features talking animals and trees with hearts and minds and agendas. It is weird, magical and fantastic. It’s what happens when writers take pleasure in making shit up.

Aqueduct Press, a leading publisher of challenging, feminist speculative fiction, is one reason Seattle stands out in this collection of genres. The press was launched in 2005 by author L. Timmel Duchamp and has published over 50 books to date, including winners of the William Atheling Jr. Award, the Carl Brandon Award and the Parallax Award. In 2008 it published Filter House, a collection of short stories by Seattle’s own Nisi Shawl which won the 2007 James Tiptree Jr. Award.

Aqueduct’s second published work, Gwyneth Jones’ novel Life, received both critical recognition and scholarly attention and won the coveted Philip K. Dick Award. Duchamp is particularly proud of this book. “When I acquired the novel, its author, who had previously offered it to major publishers in both the U.S. and the UK, was despairing of ever seeing it in print,” Duchamp recalls. “I’m also quite proud of having published Cheek by Jowl, a sharp, bright collection of essays by Ursula K. Le Guin.”

Duchamp’s own five-volume Marq’ssan cycle, consisting of Alanya to Alanya, Renegade, Tsunami, Blood in the Fruit and Stretto was also published by Aqueduct. An ambitious, political and thrilling series, much of it takes place in a war-torn but familiar Seattle.
Duchamp, who first moved to Seattle in 1979, started writing the Marq’ssan Cycle in 1984.

“Seattle in the 1980s felt very open to change and interestingly grounded in a brave and defiant history of activism and cooperative movements. Without question, this attitude and history served as a sort of playground for my imagination.”

In talking about writing in Seattle, Duchamp observes that the city offers speculative fiction writers a valuable community. “First, the community is large enough that it is easy for a newcomer to find a congenial set of writers to spend time with — especially to schedule writing dates with or to form critique groups with, and of course to network with,” she says.

All the coffee houses are another plus. “The plethora of Seattle coffee shops in which customers are welcome to sit and write all afternoon makes Seattle writing heaven,” she notes. “I suppose one might say there’s a disadvantage to having so many writers living in one city — the city’s bookstores tend to be rather blasé about having so many local authors and have little interest in carrying their books, and the local newspapers are not particularly interested in reviewing local authors. But that’s a rather small disadvantage in the larger scale of things.”

Clarion West Writing Workshop, a six-week intensive writing boot camp at the University of Washington for writers launching careers in speculative fiction, is another reason Seattle ranks so high in these genres.

Duchamp will teach this July for the second time at Clarion West, joining a roster that reads like a Who’s Who of the best writers in the field. Past instructors include Octavia Butler, Carol Emshwiller, Karen Joy Fowler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kelly Link, Patricia McKillip and Connie Willis.
“Clarion West is a fundamental part of the local spec-fic scene,” says Kelley Eskridge, who is a leading voice in speculative fiction and currently leads the Clarion West board of directors.

Clarion West was co-founded by Seattle writer Vonda N. McIntyre, who has earned speculative fiction’s two most prestigious awards, the Hugo and the Nebula. McIntyre was inspired to create the workshop after attending the Clarion Workshop in Clarion, Pa., in 1970. She worked with writer and UW professor Joanna Russ to begin housing the workshop at UW in 1971. After a hiatus, it reconvened in 1984 and has run continuously ever since.

An Aikido black belt and biologist, McIntyre is a founding voice of modern speculative fiction, winning her first Nebula for her novelette, Of Mist and Grass and Sand in 1973. A shaper of the Star Trek universe, she supplied Mr. Sulu’s first name, “Hikaru,” and wrote a number of Star Trek novels.

She also authored the Star Wars novel, The Crystal Star. Her most recent work, The Moon and the Sun, is an alternative-history fantasy set in the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, in a 17th century France where both alchemy and modern science shape events.

In talking about speculative fiction and the future, McIntyre notes that it “isn’t about prediction. It’s about ‘What would happen if...?’ If you speculate about enough topics, eventually you hit one that happens to come true, but it’s pretty random. I’m more interested in what hasn’t yet come to pass, but might.”

While McIntyre represents the old guard, Cherie Priest is an up-and-coming speculative fiction writer whose 2009 fantasy novel Boneshaker won the Hugo and Locus awards. “Boneshaker couldn’t have happened anywhere else. Seattle had just the right wacky local history to be mined, full of pioneer spirit and strange decisions,” says Priest.

She sums up the Seattle speculative fiction scene as “chummy.” The city is “very hospitable toward speculative fiction, what with the Science Fiction Museum being right on hand, and the Locus awards and Norwescon (one of the largest regional science fiction and fantasy conventions in the country), and a number of spec-fic writers running around, never mind all the movie and TV production that happens just north of us in British Columbia.”

Boneshaker is often cited as an example of steampunk, a subgenre of speculative fiction that mixes a Victorian aesthetic with steam-powered inventions. Steampunk became a heavy influence on the Seattle speculative fiction scene with the advent of SteamCon, a convention aimed at genre fans that Seattleite Dianna Vick launched two years ago. Held in a hotel near SeaTac, the annual convention features panels on topics varying from how to create a pair of goggles to the literary work of Oscar Wilde, costume contests and plenty of chances for fans to mingle. SteamCon III is planned for October 14–16, 2011.

Over on the Eastside, Redmond author Louise Marley draws deeply on her background as a concert and opera singer when writing. Her most recent novel, Mozart’s Blood, is a distinctive entry into the vampire genre that manages to never actually use the word “vampire” as it details the adventures of an opera singer born in Mozart’s time who is still singing in the modern world.

Much of Marley’s work is set in Seattle, including The Glass Harmonica, which takes place in 2018, and The Child Goddess, which has several scenes that take place in a much more distant future. Marley recently reversed chronological direction with The Sapphire Estate, which is set in Seattle circa 1920 and is to be published in 2012. When asked why she chose that setting, she points out, “Seattle was still finding its feet in the early part of the century. It was a colorful combination of pioneer culture and that of a metropolitan city. There was plenty to work with. More importantly, I love the city, and I know it well.”

Marley’s research for the book concentrated on medical history, which was both “a challenge and a delight.” She chose a female physician as the protagonist to illuminate the early feminist movement. “I learned a great deal about gender prejudice in the medical field — a prejudice which didn’t truly start to fade until the 1960s,” she reports.

She also learned a lot in the process about our region’s progressive roots and was surprised at how far ahead of the rest of the country Seattle and the state of Washington were in those days. She notes that women won the vote here ten years before the 19th Amendment was ratified and that even as a frontier city, Seattle was cutting-edge in medicine and fashion and engineering.

“I think I can safely say that’s a characteristic of Seattle that has survived into the twenty-first century.”

Cat Rambo is a fiction writer and technology journalist based in the Seattle area. Check out her website at www.kittywumpus.net.

©Copyright 2011, Caliope Publishing Company