Written by contributor Sophia Mattice
In this conversation with science fiction and fantasy author Stephen Leigh, he introduces his new interstellar novel Amid the Crowd of Stars, which tackles what might happen when the people who have inhabited a new planet for several generations might not be “people” as we know them. Leigh fills us in on the potential moral quandaries of space travel, the need for more diversity in the sci-fi genre and what it’s like to teach creative writing while you’re doing it.
Hi, Stephen! Tell us a bit about yourself and your new novel, Amid the Crowd of Stars!
I’m a Cincinnati-based writer, and I’ve been writing for a long time now. I’ve currently published 30 published novels (AMID will be 31) and somewhere north of 60 pieces of short fiction. For those who might be interested you can find out more at my website.
As to AMID THE CROWD OF STARS, I started the novel back in April of 2016 and handed in my ‘final’ draft in October of 2020—so for those who think I’m a ‘fast’ writer: nope. Not true. Not at all. AMID is set to be released on Feb 9, 2021—which also demonstrates that publishers are generally not ‘fast’ either, as there’s a significant time lapse between “OK, the novel’s done” to the book appearing in stores. To quote from DAW Books cover copy:
This innovative sci-fi novel explores the potential impact of alien infection on humankind as they traverse the stars and find themselves stranded on new and strange planets.
Amid the Crowd of Stars is a grand scale science fiction novel examining the ethical implications of interstellar travel, a topic rarely addressed in science fiction novels. What responsibilities do we have to isolate ourselves from the bacteria, viruses, and other life of another world, and to prevent any of that alien biome from being brought back to Earth?
What happens when a group of humans are stranded for centuries on another world with no choice but to expose themselves to that world? After such long exposure, are they still Homo sapiens or have they become another species entirely?
These questions are at the heart of this intriguing novel, explored through the complicated lives and the viewpoints of the people who have come to rescue the stranded colony, the members of that colony, and the sentient alien life that dwells on the planet. Difficult life and death choices will be made by all involved.
And that should give you a decent idea of what the book’s generally about.
Since you have been writing science fiction since grade school, what were your inspirations to tell those stories? Have any of them influenced ‘Amid the Crowd of Stars’?
I don’t know that any of those grade school inspirations influenced AMID. Heck, I’ve forgotten what those inspirations were by now!
Well, actually I haven’t forgotten. Back then, I was a voracious reader of the genre, and I haunted that section of the local library, devouring the stories and books there. I cut my fictional teeth on the 19th century Verne and Wells novels, on the “Golden Age” era writers like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and (my favorite) Ray Bradbury as well as others publishing at the time—the late 50s through the mid-60s. But the genre section was finite, sadly, and I eventually read them all and found myself hungry for more of the same.
I figured that the only way to scratch that particular itch was to start making up my own stories, and I did. That was my inspiration. I started writing my own (really, really awful) stories, and continued doing that through high school and into college, where my then-girlfriend (who would eventually become my spouse—and still is!) and another friend who was also an aspiring writer, convinced me that I should stop ‘writing for the drawer’ and start sending out some of the stories. Still in college, I sold a couple of my stories to semiprozines paying a penny a word or less. My first truly ‘pro’ sale was to Analog magazine, edited at the time by Ben Bova, in the summer after my college graduation and my marriage to Denise, and it paid a huge $375. Mind you, at the time Denise and I were paying $100/month rent on our apartment so that check could pay our rent for almost four months (which tells you how long ago that was). I thought we were rich.
That did it. I was hooked.
Many sci-fi stories involving space travel seem to revolve around a group of humans landing on a new planet only to discover an alien danger and escape as quickly as possible back to earth. Your book seems to focus more on the biological intricacies of interstellar travel and making a different atmosphere liveable?
Well, that’s not quite an accurate description. AMID definitely focuses on some of the issues we face in traveling to other worlds—if I look back to the original seeds of the novel, it was a reaction to seeing far too many movies and reading too many stories where the humans reach another Earth-like world, check to see if the atmosphere is breathable, and then immediately take off their helmets and inhale a deep breath of that new air… ignoring the fact that they’re breathing in unknown viruses, bacteria, disease, and a potentially mutative environment while we in turn poison that world with our viruses/bacteria/diseases/mutable biota. It’s a reflection of what happened when the Europeans came to the New World and infected the native cultures there with smallpox and other diseases to which the locals had no natural immunity. Who knows how many millions died because the Europeans were vectors of horrible diseases?
There’s a reason we sterilize all the probes we send out to other planets and satellites, and a reason why we generally don’t try to recover them afterward.
AMID looks at those issues and the ethical problems inherent with them. If we go to another world and spend time there, maybe we can’t (or shouldn’t) go back, because we’re no longer Homo sapiens, but Homo something-else. That’s at the core of AMID.
When you were writing ‘Amid the Crowd of Stars’ did you have an idea of how it would end when you began, or did it surprise you as you went along?
The Santa Fe/Albuquerque writers who formed the core the WILD CARD series writers, and of which group I’ve been a far-flung part since the mid-1980s, have a terminology for the polar opposite ends of the approach-to-writing spectrum. At one end you have “Gardeners” who take a seed of an idea, plant it in their subconscious, and just see what happens as they write; the other end of spectrum is the Architect, who must have every last scene plotted out on paper or in their mind before they can even start.
Now, most writers exists somewhere on the continuum between those two polar opposites. Me, I’m closer to the Gardener end: I usually have a good idea of where I intend to start the story and maybe even what will be in the first few chapters, what characters are involved in those initial scenes and what their agendas are as well as who my protagonist(s) will be. I often have a vague idea of where I hope for them to end up at the end.
But I have no idea what’s between that opening and the hazy end off in the far distance. I figure out all that as I’m drafting the novel. Often, that means that my characters don’t end up where I envisioned them going bur somewhere else—and that’s just fine with me as long as I like where they land and it makes sense and tells a good story. So yes, I’m very often surprised by the changes I make as the draft goes along, or I’ll have a sudden epiphany that this needs to happen. Often enough that requires me doing back and ripping out sections of the draft and throwing them away so I can make those changes work. For one of my books, IMMORTAL MUSE, the revision involved cutting out and tossing about 40,000 words of draft—a short novel’s worth of material that had taken me months to writer—and replacing it because it ‘just didn’t work’ with the new vision of the book. Usually, it’s not that drastic (thank the Muse!) but you get the idea.
That’s the bane of the Gardener end of the spectrum: you usually need to do more revision than the Architect because you’re still figuring out how best to move things along while you’re still writing. But the Architect has the opposite problem: Architects tend to be uncomfortable with changes to The Original Plan they put together, and thus their stories can seem too pat and unsurprising as a result.
But… let me emphasize that very few writers are 100% Gardener or 100% Architect. As I said, most of us are somewhere along the continuum, not at either end.
Since you also write a lot of high fantasy, do you feel like one genre is more challenging and/or fulfilling than the other?
I enjoy writing both fantasy and science fiction. I don’t think one is necessarily more challenging than the other, with this minor exception: in fantasy, you’re sometimes required to build an entire world from scratch and that world has little-to-no connection to our own actual world. In that case, as a writer you have the additional task of having to fill in a fair amount of invented history in order for the novel and characters to make sense to the reader, and you have to do that without resorting to deadly infodumps and lengthy passages of expositive backstory, either of which will utterly destroy the narrative flow.
I find both genres fulfilling in the sense that I can choose to use one or the other depending on the needs of the story I’m trying to tell. Actually, the initial proposal of AMID THE CROWD OF STARS (under the abandoned title COLOR THE SEA) that I sent to Sheila at DAW books was a steam-punkish fantasy set in a faux late-19th century/early 20th century Ireland; I actually wrote five or six chapters of that version before deciding that, for the story I really wanted to tell, it’d be better to move it to a future time and another world entirely.
A quick aside: A WRITER SHOULD NEVER THROW OUT ANYTHING. I still have those initial 7,000+ words of abandoned fantasy in case I decide down the road to use that world later. And for the same reason, I still have the 40,000+ words of IMMORTAL MUSE that I tossed out as well fragments of other novels and stories. You never know when you might want to go back and use something from the Discard Pile!
In science fiction, even when the story’s set in some future time, at least the reader shares historical knowledge with the reader up until the present time, so your worldbuilding starts at that point and moves forward. You don’t have to explain the background as much to the reader; they’re already familiar with the world up to the present time. We can, for instance, reference ‘the events of 9/11’ and not have to explain to the reader what happened then.
But both science fiction and fantasy can be used as a funhouse mirror to reflect back to the reader our human foibles, issues, and concerns, sometimes in exaggerated and twisted form. The truth is that no matter when or where your science fiction or fantasy novel is set, a writer can’t escape the world in which they’re currently living, and our current world will be there in the writing, like it or not. To see that, go back and read sf or fantasy written in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and so on—you’ll see those decades, their attitudes and their culture reflected underneath the setting and the characters.
Science fiction and fantasy aren’t really about our future or an imagined past, they’re about Now.
Do you think science fiction literature is headed in a specific direction in terms of story trends? Why or why not?
One trend I’m happy to see is our genre becoming less European-centric and more open to diverse viewpoints, cultures, and styles of writing. I’m happy to see writers coming into the genre from other cultures, backgrounds, and ethnicities and being accepted—and starting to win awards and praise for the stories they write.
Heck, read Nnedi Okorafor’s wonderful and evocative novels and stories if you want proof, or check out Chinese writer Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem, which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel and was nominated for the Nebula Award. For that matter, in my opinion the ‘magic realism’ genre, probably best represented by the late Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, really belong under the wider umbrella of ‘fantasy’.
Mind you, I say this as a caucasian male, which I know is the most privileged creature it’s possible to be here in the States, and I’m very aware of that. But this old white guy is happy to move over to make room for the rest of the world to come in too. The bookcases are wide enough for their books too, and I’m eager to learn what they have to offer.
What’s more challenging, teaching creative writing or endeavoring to finish your own creative writing?
I’ve been happy to do both. In the science fiction writing community, there’s the concept that those of us who write must all “pay forward”, and that’s what I tried to do as a teacher. I was helped along in my career by writers who were further along and better-known than I am, and it’s not possible for me to pay them back for the help they gave me—because they don’t need my help.
Instead, what any of us can do is look back to other new writers further down the mountain and offer them a hand up in the form of advice. Maybe we can point out pitfalls that we fell into so they can avoid them, or tell them the advantages and disadvantages of the various paths toward the summit. Maybe they’ll take that advice and maybe they won’t, but we need to at least make the effort.
I love it when one of my students tells me they’ve sold a story or their novel (as several have over the years). I hope each and every one of them continues to write and ends up surpassing me. That would be fantastic and the greatest tribute any teacher can receive.
What’s next for you?
I’m currently in the midst of writing a new novel, tentatively entitled BOUND TO A SINGLE SUN, which is essentially an examination of what happens when we modify ourselves into something other than Homo sapiens. I won’t say too much more than that. I’m currently about 79,000 words into the first draft, so there’s still a LONG way to go—and who knows what might change between now and the finished final draft?
And there’s also short fiction to write for various editors, so I’m not at all lacking stuff to do.
Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for our readers?
No specific recommendations (though I’ve mentioned a few above) other than to say that if you want to write books, I’d suggest reading widely rather than narrowly. Read every piece of fiction you can get your hands on, in any genre whatsoever, because they all have something they can teach you. Read writers from other cultures and countries. If you like a writer, go and find other books of theirs. If you read a review of something and it sounds interesting, grab that book and read it.
And as a writer, don’t neglect nonfiction—I read lots of nonfiction because I find that it’s a fantastic way to set ideas blooming in your head that you can (and will) use for your fiction.
