John Scalzi writes science fiction because of a coin toss
John Scalzi, appearing at the American Writers Festival on May 15 (in conversation with the terrific Chicago sciencefiction writer Michi Trota), once brought 13 ideas to a major publisher, hoping for a handful to sound like new books. The publisher bought all 13. Which has been cushy for the past few years. He’s on book five, pausing only to deal with TV adaptations. Of which there are lots, in various stages. He writes a familiar, knowing, popular science fiction, riffing on tropes, “Star Trek,” “Starship Troopers”; his latest, “The Kaiju Preservation Society,” is a kind of Godzilla homage. A University of Chicago graduate and former Chicago journalist (then movie critic for the Fresno Bee), he even wrote an Audible original that remakes noir as a Chicago crime story where the murdered always return. He spoke on the phone recently from his home near Dayton:
Q: Are you writing for people who don’t care about science fiction? A:
I am. One thing I think we have to do in science fiction is have someone at the door: “Never read science fiction? Well, here’s something to try.” There is an impression of science fiction literature being inaccessible — or you have to read for 30 years to get it.
Q: Is that why you stick to familiar elements? A:
Absolutely. Everyone knows Godzilla even if they don’t know he’s also called kaiju.
Q: Yet your stories can be so nuts, I wonder: Are you bored with science fiction? A:
No, and that’s the point. The nice thing is (science fiction) allows the flexibility to interrogate premises. “The Dispatcher” — I wrote this bizarre concept where if you kill someone in anger they come back pissed, but I wrote it as noir. And it allowed me the room to play in Chicago. A lot of genres don’t have that flexibility, or you have to make excuses or compensate somehow. You don’t have to in science fiction. There are fundamental things to do to keep it speculative but once you clear that low bar, it’s fair game. You become like a carnival barker. For many years, (the question was) “science fiction, is it literature?”
And then there’s this idea that it’s hard to get into. I don’t think it’s true, but in the last 20 years, the people who write science fiction have gotten over the sense they have to apologize or dumb down. What you’re seeing now is the authorship of science fiction and fantasy willing to engage with concepts of literature, interrogate premises in science fiction that were taken for granted. I would fight endlessly for this, but I think, as a genre, it is as good right now as it ever was. There’s a wider number of kinds of people writing, writing stories that you wouldn’t have seen even 20 years ago.
Q: Is it true you have the largest number of one and five-star reviews on Amazon? A:
And Goodreads. I get that. People are like, ‘Everything about this is wonderful,’ or people say, “He writes like an 11-year-old.” My style is intentionally colloquial. I do a lot of storytelling through dialogue. Hence, “Does he write in crayon?” I love that reaction.
Q: So are your influences more dialogue-heavy writers — crime writers, say? A:
I often tell people Nora Ephron is as much an influence as Robert Heinlein. I didn’t intend to be a science fiction novelist. I was going to work in newspapers my whole life. I was going to be a columnist like Mike Royko or a critic like Ebert. I worked at Chicago newspapers the whole time I was in college, freelancing at the Sun-Times, the New City. My grades! I had a 2.8 average at the University of Chicago. My girlfriend told me I was taking up space for someone more deserving. I was a high-functioning idiot. So when I sat down to write my first novel, I thought: I read a lot of science fiction and a lot of crime. I literally flipped a coin. If it landed on tails, who knows we would be talking today.