Nicola Griffith on her writing, genre, kittens, ableism, and more
April 20, 2021 4:30 AM Subscribe
"To me, honestly, genre is just a vehicle I use to cross the story terrain. So depending on what story I want to tell, I use the appropriate genre." Author Nicola Griffith, author of scifi, historical fiction, detective fiction, nonfiction, and more, discusses her books and writing journey in an interview from late 2020. She learned more about how her own fiction works while writing a PhD thesis a few years ago. Griffith's blog has tons of interesting musings, on topics including the phenomenon of marginalized readers feeling "momentarily flummoxed by fiction that doesn't push us down" and identity and science fiction. "Reading SF, the over-riding value of which is the new, keeps our reticular activating systems primed: we expect everything and anything."
Thank you for posting this. Beautiful writing. This section from the linked piece on identity and science fiction really resonates with me:
"Reading good fiction, particularly good SF, keeps the adolescent sense of possibility jacked wide open. A sense of possibility maintains plasticity, it keeps us able to see what’s out there. Without this sense of possibility, we see only what we expect.
Someone who runs on the same beach at dawn every day for two years gets used to certain things: being alone, the hiss and suck of the waves, the boulder that juts from the rock pool at the point where she leaps the rill, the cry of the gulls, the smell of seaweed, all in tones of grey and blue. So there you are one morning, running along, cruising on autopilot, using the non-slippery part of the boulder to give you a boost as you jump over the rill, listening unconsciously to the gulls squabbling over something at the water line. You’re thinking about breakfast, or the sex you had last night; you’re humming that music everyone’s been listening to the last week; you’re wrestling with some knotty problem for which you have the glimmerings of a solution. There’s a dead body on the beach. You run right past it: you literally don’t see it.
It’s counterintuitive, but it happens all the time: the white-faced driver staring at the tricycle crushed under his front wheel, “I just didn’t see him, officer.” The microbiologist who skips past the Petri dish in a batch of sixty cultures with that curiously empty ring, that lack of growth, in the centre. The homeowner who returns to his condo and doesn’t see the broken window, the muddy footprints leading to the closet and the suitcase full of valuables lying open on the bed. Every day, during our various routines, the movie of what we expect plays on the back of our eyelids while our brain goes on holiday. How many times do we got out of the car at the office and realise we don’t remember a thing about the journey?
Reading SF, the over-riding value of which is the new, keeps our reticular activating systems primed: we expect everything and anything. And if we expect, we can see. If we see, we try find an explanation. We form a hypothesis. We test it. We learn. We tell a story.
A science fiction story not only excites us about the world, it excites us about ourselves, how we fit within the systems that govern our universe, and excites us, paradoxically, about our potential to change the world. The best SF is, in a sense, about love: loving the world and our place within it so much that we make the effort to make a difference. But science fiction changes more than the world, more than our place in the world, it changes us. Science fiction has changed the discourse on what it means to be human. It introduced us to the notion that the nature of body and mind are mutable through tall tales of human cloning, prosthetics, genetic engineering. What would people look like today without prosthetics (contact lenses, artificial hips and knees, pacemakers and stents, dentures), cosmetic surgery, gene therapy? The more we change our story of ourselves, the more we change."
posted by RobinofFrocksley at 9:15 AM on April 20, 2021 [7 favorites]
"Reading good fiction, particularly good SF, keeps the adolescent sense of possibility jacked wide open. A sense of possibility maintains plasticity, it keeps us able to see what’s out there. Without this sense of possibility, we see only what we expect.
Someone who runs on the same beach at dawn every day for two years gets used to certain things: being alone, the hiss and suck of the waves, the boulder that juts from the rock pool at the point where she leaps the rill, the cry of the gulls, the smell of seaweed, all in tones of grey and blue. So there you are one morning, running along, cruising on autopilot, using the non-slippery part of the boulder to give you a boost as you jump over the rill, listening unconsciously to the gulls squabbling over something at the water line. You’re thinking about breakfast, or the sex you had last night; you’re humming that music everyone’s been listening to the last week; you’re wrestling with some knotty problem for which you have the glimmerings of a solution. There’s a dead body on the beach. You run right past it: you literally don’t see it.
It’s counterintuitive, but it happens all the time: the white-faced driver staring at the tricycle crushed under his front wheel, “I just didn’t see him, officer.” The microbiologist who skips past the Petri dish in a batch of sixty cultures with that curiously empty ring, that lack of growth, in the centre. The homeowner who returns to his condo and doesn’t see the broken window, the muddy footprints leading to the closet and the suitcase full of valuables lying open on the bed. Every day, during our various routines, the movie of what we expect plays on the back of our eyelids while our brain goes on holiday. How many times do we got out of the car at the office and realise we don’t remember a thing about the journey?
Reading SF, the over-riding value of which is the new, keeps our reticular activating systems primed: we expect everything and anything. And if we expect, we can see. If we see, we try find an explanation. We form a hypothesis. We test it. We learn. We tell a story.
A science fiction story not only excites us about the world, it excites us about ourselves, how we fit within the systems that govern our universe, and excites us, paradoxically, about our potential to change the world. The best SF is, in a sense, about love: loving the world and our place within it so much that we make the effort to make a difference. But science fiction changes more than the world, more than our place in the world, it changes us. Science fiction has changed the discourse on what it means to be human. It introduced us to the notion that the nature of body and mind are mutable through tall tales of human cloning, prosthetics, genetic engineering. What would people look like today without prosthetics (contact lenses, artificial hips and knees, pacemakers and stents, dentures), cosmetic surgery, gene therapy? The more we change our story of ourselves, the more we change."
posted by RobinofFrocksley at 9:15 AM on April 20, 2021 [7 favorites]
Oooh, this sounds good:
Then of course, I wrote this other books. But this book, Oh, wow. Jonathan, I am so excited about this new book. It’s the working title is Spear. And it’s like Hild but set 100 years earlier. And with magic. It’s basically a take on the Arthurian legend. And it’s swords and horses and magic and fighting and lots of love and sex. I had the best time doing his book. I really love this, and I can’t wait for people to read it. It’s all the things I really loved about doing Hild. But again, I got to play. I got to put magic in it, which I resisted with Hild.
posted by umber vowel at 1:15 PM on April 20, 2021 [1 favorite]
Then of course, I wrote this other books. But this book, Oh, wow. Jonathan, I am so excited about this new book. It’s the working title is Spear. And it’s like Hild but set 100 years earlier. And with magic. It’s basically a take on the Arthurian legend. And it’s swords and horses and magic and fighting and lots of love and sex. I had the best time doing his book. I really love this, and I can’t wait for people to read it. It’s all the things I really loved about doing Hild. But again, I got to play. I got to put magic in it, which I resisted with Hild.
posted by umber vowel at 1:15 PM on April 20, 2021 [1 favorite]
I'm so excited for Menewood and now Spear. I've re-read Hild about 4 times. Learned about it on Metafilter!
posted by travertina at 2:31 PM on April 22, 2021
posted by travertina at 2:31 PM on April 22, 2021
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