Q&A: Fuzzy Nation Author John Scalzi
By Josh Hadro Apr 21, 2011Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, V—the "reboot" of franchises has become part of the sf playbook. Yet while it's one thing for corporations to hire a creative team to retool a property, it's quite another for one author to overhaul the world and characters of a past master.
That's exactly what best-selling sf icon and prominent blogger John Scalzi has done with his latest novel, Fuzzy Nation (see review, LJ 4/15/11), rewriting the characters and situations in H. Beam Piper's 1962 Hugo-nominated Little Fuzzy and giving them a contemporary spin. In a recent interview, Scalzi told LJ that his efforts were in part an act of fan fiction, highlighting sf's debt to Piper. "Part of doing this was not only to have fun with the story but also to refocus attention on a writer who was important," says Scalzi. "Piper has several books that are acknowledged classics in the field, and yet they've fallen off the radar."
Fallen off the radar is right—and into the public domain. The rights to Little Fuzzy expired because they weren't renewed, but Scalzi did seek explicit permission from the estate to use the characters—after he'd finished writing. As a former journalist, a blogger who openly posted his first two novels, and current president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Scalzi's got just about all of the author-side angles of publishing covered. LJ spoke with him for our May, 1, 2011, cover story about writers with similar styles, the future of his own intellectual property, the plight of today's authors required to sell themselves on Twitter, and the case for libraries.
LJ: What brought this reboot about?
Scalzi: I was reading Little Fuzzy again not so long ago, and, on one hand, it's incredibly enjoyable—H. Beam Piper's craft in terms of the language still speaks to us. But at the same time, for example, the opening scene has Jack Holloway there stroking his mustache, smoking a pipe, basically the very model of an anachronism. I was thinking of it as a fun intellectual exercise: writing this today for audiences today—what would you change, what would you make different?
I also wrote it when I was feeling very cranky about publishing because I had just been working on [a deal] that had fallen through, and so I was just very much like "screw them. I'm going to write something that's going to be fun for me to write." And that's what I did.
LJ: Say your works are in the public domain—are there worlds of yours you'd like to see future authors reboot?
Scalzi: Whatever they want to do is completely fine with me. I'll be dead! While I'm alive and while my wife is alive, specifically, I want to make sure that we receive the benefits of the work. But the idea that the great-grandchildren I will never meet might be sitting there going, "Oh, well, my great-grandfather wanted this about his art, and he was very serious about this." It's like, "Dude, yeah, I don't even know you. Go out and get a job." Life plus 70 is completely ridiculous. Life plus 25 is sufficient.
I don't have any opposition now, frankly. If people want to write fan fiction, or if they just can't wait until the next Old Man's War or Android's Dream [Scalzi's earlier titles] book comes out, and they just have to make up something of their own and put it up on their own website, go right ahead.
But there's a difference between encroaching on my financial interests—which would be taking my characters and trying to exploit them commercially without me at least being involved in the process—and someone just writing a story for fun, sharing it with their friends. If they have John Perry [the soldier protagonist of Old Man's War] dressed up as a were-rabbit, fighting vampires or something like that, then that's fun because the canonical John Perry won't be doing these things.
My complaint isn't against people playing with my characters—my actual complaint is I don't see people playing with my characters all that much. I'm like, "Where's my fan fiction?!"
LJ: Pretend you're a librarian for a minute. What readalikes might you point patrons to, or what other authors and titles might you recommend?
Scalzi: Well, if I'm not pointing them to Little Fuzzy and all the rest of the Piper books, someone will come and shoot me. Beyond that, a lot of what makes my books what they are is not necessarily the subject matter but how the language is used.
I tell a lot of the story through dialog. Some people whom I keyed off on: obviously [Robert] Heinlein's one, but also folks like Steven Brust, who in his "Vlad Taltos" series has a lot of back and forth between the characters.
I've also told people that a lot of the influences on my writing are not in science fiction per se but are some of the great humorists of the 20th century—[James] Thurber and Robert Benchley and even Dorothy Parker to some extent. Ben Hecht. William Goldman.
A little bit closer in time, Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard in the genre of mysteries and crime fiction; Gregory McDonald, who did the "Fletch" books. Sometimes that surprises people. I think science fiction people are like any other group of genre folks in that they tend to read heavily in their own genre and less so in other genres.
If people want to be ambitious, I would say someone like China Miéville—"you're not scared of science fiction anymore, here's something that's a little bit further out into the water."
LJ: Many of your novels feature negotiation and diplomacy at pivotal plot points. Is that true to the life and business of someone who makes a living off of intellectual property?
Scalzi: I don't think that it has to relate to business, though one of the great tragedies of our field is that so many very good writers are also so very, very bad at handling their business and their money.
If you have someone who is coming in and is saying, "It will be this way," and they do it in a sort of a tin-pot dictator way, that's not necessarily particularly interesting because you know how that's going to go. They will either win, or they won't. It's a binary storytelling choice. Part of what you do to keep the readers curious and part of what you do to keep them going is the stuff like the negotiation, the back and forth, the shifting of ground beneath the characters. Basically, it adds drama as opposed to "it's my way or the highway. Damn you all!"
LJ: Are you as tough a negotiator as some of those characters?
Scalzi: I try to be a tin-pot dictator as much as possible simply because it makes my life easier. But the fact of the matter is, in real life, you end up doing a lot of negotiating because the path of the tin-pot dictator is one that basically ends badly for the tin-pot dictator, whether they are Muammar Gaddafi or John Scalzi.
LJ: Margaret Atwood recently lamented all of the tweeting and blogging authors are being asked (or arm-twisted) to take on. What do you make of an author's self-promotion duties?
Scalzi: If you go through publishing history, there have always been authors who have been very good at publicity, who have been cheerfully happy to talk to whomever wants to talk to them about any particular thing and get their name out because they understand that that's part of the gig. I mean, Mark Twain wasn't the first person to go on speaking tours.
There are some people who are going to be dreadful at it, and if they are, then they need to find some way to do it that doesn't make them feel like they're having their teeth pulled out. What people really need to be doing is knowing their own strengths, knowing their own weaknesses. Like Margaret Atwood. Maybe she doesn't want to tweet because she thinks it's asinine. You know what? Tweeting is asinine. The other day I put up a tweet going, "So anybody got gum," and I immediately got 50 tweets going, "Yes, I do have gum. Would you like it?"
If Margaret Atwood doesn't want to do that, who can blame her? But 20 years from now there will be a new type of social networking thing that I will be looking at and going, you know what? I'm going to let someone else do that.
LJ: So, is there a proper model for publishers and authors?
Scalzi: Everybody wants one basic template, and so they look at the people who are doing something and they say, "This is the way to do it." But there is no one way of doing it. For example, Cory Doctorow and I get pegged as people who really get the web. Others say, "You should utilize the web like John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow."
That's not necessarily possible. Cory Doctorow and I came up at a particular moment when blogs were exploding. I've done the Whatever blog for 13 years now, right? Cory's got Boing Boing, which is it's own phenomenon.
You're not going to replicate a Boing Boing. You're not going to replicate a Whatever unless you've got 13 years and can go back in time to 1998. That was a particular moment in time that allowed us to make that particular jump ahead. It worked for us, and the moment has passed.
Right now there are people, like my friend [blogger and geek culture celebrity] Wil Wheaton, who has 1.7 million Twitter followers. Because of that, he is not only writing but doing other creative stuff as well. But if you say, "Well, clearly the solution is to go and get a million Twitter followers"—you can't necessarily do that.
Each time lightning gets caught in the bottle, everyone points to it and says that's how it works. No—these are people in the right place at that particular time in publishing history.
LJ: Right now libraries and publishers are at an impasse over ebooks. What's your take on how publishers are experimenting?
Scalzi: HarperCollins [recently announcing its 26 ebook loan cap] is probably being penny-wise and pound-foolish because the money that will go into buying a second and third copy of whatever ebook that they have could go instead to purchasing another book by another HarperCollins author.
Overall, I guess the question is, what is healthier for a publisher? To have one book bought three or four times by a library, or to have that library buy one copy of four books by individual authors, those authors then being exposed to the patrons of the library who will possibly become fans and then seek out those books in the actual marketplace?
The primary problem is that we have a market that's in flux. Basically, what [publishers] say is, "Here is a dependable stream of income"—mass markets, hardcovers, trade paperbacks—"and if we don't screw it up, then we're fine."
We are just not at the point where this particular medium has figured itself out, and, of course, once it does figure itself out, then there will be something else that comes along and will screw it all up for everybody again.
Ten years ago, we were in the middle of a flux with music sales, and it went from them trying to sell these electronic versions of stuff that would be completely locked up and without really good distribution of it online. As a result, because they basically made it extraordinarily restricted and they also didn't have a good retail backend, it changed the market so completely that the music industry has not recovered.
Books, I think, will be different for a number of reasons. One, because when electronic books finally went mainstream, there was a robust retail backend. You had Amazon and you had Barnes & Noble involved. Google has gotten involved now. So, by and large, for everybody who's not a 16-year-old hacker, it is easier for them simply to go to Amazon and get something off the Kindle as opposed to going and trying to get it off of Bittorrent.
You can't necessarily blame the publishers for saying, "What's in this for us?" The only problem with that is, you start to think, are they going to miss the bus? Are they, in ten years, going to be like the music companies are now, where all their major acts can go off and self-publish.
LJ: Does that appeal to you?
Scalzi: Well, I could [self-publish] right now if I wanted to write a novel, pay someone to edit it, copyedit it, put it on Amazon, the iBookstore, and Barnes & Noble retail channels and get 70 percent of that going directly to me. But then the question becomes, what are my core competencies? Do I really want to spend all that time doing all that other crap when what I'm good at is writing books and then telling people, "Hey, I wrote this cool book!" Those are the two things that I know I'm good at: I'm good at writing, I'm pretty good at marketing.
The other stuff? I'm not an artist. I'm the worst copyeditor in the world. So I don't want to do that. I want somebody else to do that.
LJ: How do libraries fit into the life of your books?
Scalzi: Fundamentally I'm very pro-library—I don't think that that would surprise anybody. But I'm very pro-library in a philosophical sense, because I think that every city, every town, every village, every place where there's people needs to have a repository of knowledge and people who can help those in that area use it.
That's not just a question of, well, it makes good economic sense to have libraries. No—it's for the intellectual, moral, philosophical health of our nation. You need these things. In that sense, I don't care if a library does anything for my career. In that sense, my response to your question is: it's completely irrelevant.
On the other hand, when I was a kid, I grew up poor. I spent a lot of time in the library, and I had librarians who were like, "Well, if you like that, here's something else that you will like." They were knowledgeable!
When I decided to wander out of the children's area, they made sure that I got the books that would actually make sense for me, because they knew who I was.
The library is where I had my first exposure to Heinlein, [Isaac] Asimov, Brust, to a lot of authors who were formative for my science fiction brain. A librarian pointed me in the direction of H.L. Mencken—and I suddenly knew that I wanted to become a journalist and a columnist. And I did.
If a librarian points somebody to my work, and they read it and they enjoy it and they say, "Yes, this is what I want more of," then perhaps later when that person becomes old enough and has a job and goes to buy my books, it's good for me. But the point for me about libraries is not how they work for my career but basically how they work for my culture.
This article originally appeared in the newsletter BookSmack! Click here to subscribe.
| Author Information |
| Josh Hadro (jhadro@mediasourceinc.com; @hadro on Twitter) is Associate Editor, LJ, covering reference, ebooks, and academic libraries |
