A last look at ConDFW – conversation with Yoon Ha Lee

Part II:

Earlier this week, I promised to give readers a peek at the writing guests of honor from last weekend’s final edition of science fiction/fantasy convention, ConDFW. First up was the prolific, genre-bending Charlaine Harris. Today’s entry is another multi-published writer those cross-genre talents might tax even Harris’s imagination. Enter Yoon Ha Lee, the Locus Award-winning author of Ninefox Gambit and its sequels, as well as middle-grade space opera Dragon Pearl, published last month, and multiple short stories.

“I’m queer, I’m transgender, I’m bisexual,” Lee said, explaining how he foreswore his teenage allegiance to Ender’s Game after discovering the political opinions of its author, Orson Scott Card.

(For the record, Lee is a native of Houston, Texas, of Korean ancestry. He is also a former mathematics teacher, is bipolar, married to a quantum astrophysicist and parent to a 15-year-old daughter. Oh, and he has a very spoiled cat.)

“I spent half my childhood in Houston and half in South Korea,” he told moderator (and planetologist and fellow cat lover) John DeLaughter. “We came home (to South Korea) a lot for reasons my parents never explained, because they didn’t explain stuff to kids.”

Lee originally started writing science fiction with “all white characters and Western settings” because these were the models he had grown up with. But after hearing about the phenomenon of cultural appropriation he realized, “Yes, I’m Korean. I can write Korean characters.”

Yoon Ha Lee

He also, however, loves ancient Greek myths. After learning that Rick Riordan, author of the Lightning Thief series based on classical mythology, was interested in writers immersed in other mythic cultures, Lee decided to give it a try.

“I bet no one else is going to pitch Korean mythology space opera,” Lee said. “And I was right!”

Still, Lee confesses a yearning to write an Iliad as space opera. “But without Achilles, because he annoyed me, particularly because he got Patroclus killed. When I was eight, I thought Achilles and Patroclus were just friends. Then I read the adult version and realized – oh, they didn’t tell me that when I was eight in Houston.”

“They still don’t tell you that at age eight in Houston,” DeLaughter said.

Other themes of Lee work include non-Homo sapien intelligences (which he ascribes to the influence of Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz ), and societal hierarchies influenced by the Confucian culture he experienced during his childhood years in Korea. 

“We stole Confucianism from the Chinese and then became more Confucian than Confucius.”

“Is that something you would like to see go away in Korea?” DeLaughter asked.

“It’s not all evil,” Lee said. “Teachers are very respected in Korea, so they are able to manage their classrooms better than in America, but there are a lot of things that are problematic.”

And then there are the names, which often are based on jokes and numbers. “I know a lot of people say numbers are dehumanizing, but as a person who majored in math, I find numbers fascinating.”

Admittedly, what everyone in the ConDFW audience wanted to know was the prolific Lee’s advice on how to write.

“Finish your things,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how awful a manuscript is, it can always be fixed in revision.”

And given his mastery of short stories, did he find that writing them gained credibility for his novel-writing efforts, an audience member asked.

“I did the old-fashioned thing of writing short stories, which I did for 17 years, before writing a novel. Which is not time-efficient. Having that credibility from short stories helps, but if you want to write novels, you must write that novel!”

(And for readers who want to hear more from Lee, mark your calendars for this year’s North Texas Teen Book Festival, (www.northtexasteenbookfestival.com), March 22-23 in Irving, Texas, where he will appear again.)

Eerie birds take over a space station in this sci-fi story

I notice that in my occasional posting of previously-published short stories, the last entry was about a pair of eerie birds. Here’s another one for the bird watchers – originally published June 2015 in Luna Station Quarterly, which described it as a most unusual use of origami! I’m also fond of this story because, as a winner in FenCon short story contest the previous year, it won me a free place in that science fiction/fantasy convention’s writing workshop. Although Luna Station is a magazine for science fiction short stories by women writers. The characters, however, can be of any gender, as in:

Paper, Planet, Space

The shuttle’s airlock frames the orbiting station Gaia, bright against blackness, the cable between it and the shuttle stretching like a tightrope, maybe fifty meters. It looks long as eternity.

I open my palm to release my signature artwork, an origami dove, one of those that always open my installations. I turn both viewports of my helmet toward the dove, hovering in silhouette against the airless void. Got to be sure both the forward and dorsal cameras pick it up. Then I clutch the cable in both hands. Thank god the camera’s electrodes are synaptically controlled. I think about taking my hands off the cable’s synthetic umbilical cord even for an instant. A sudden burst of sweat drenches me under my spacesuit. With a low hum of vibration, the humidity controls whisk me dry.

“Is it still falling when it’s this far up?”

“Don’t worry, sir.” The shuttle crew member waiting beside me clips a link from my suit to the cable. How many space tourists has she conducted along this same adventure?  “You can’t fall. Your auto safe will bring you in.”

Reel me in like a fish? I step off the shuttle’s bay, into the void.  

“Captain Nguyen of Gaia here, Mr. Villafranca.” A Texas drawl crackles in my headset. “You’re doing fine, sir. Just don’t look down.”

“Thanks, captain.” I open my eyes. When had I closed them?  Had the captain been able to see that through my faceplate? “I can’t even tell which way down is.”

“An astute observation. At this altitude, planetary gravity is too slight to register on our proprioceptors. But do me the favor of taking a deep breath. Your blood O2 level’s kind of low.”

“Nothing like a good whiff of canned air to put things in perspective.” I look back toward the shuttle. Already I’m several meters away. Another surge of panic. But the origami dove I set free floats beside me. How can that happen when we’re traveling god knows how fast? There. It’s caught in the shoulder joint of my suit. I take one hand off the cable, flick the dove loose. It vanishes from sight.

“Four hundred kilometers,” I whisper.

“Sir?” Nguyen again.  

“Trying to remembering how far I am from Earth, captain.”

“Actually, Mr. Villafranca, you’re just over four hundred and seventeen klicks out. Gaia’s slightly below you.”

“So I’m up? And you’re down?” I stare along the cable toward Gaia. Then, beyond her eclipse, I see my home planet in its blue veil of sky.

“Breathe, Mr. Villafranca, breathe.”

I wave to Gaia, to Nguyen, invisibly watching me. 

I take my other hand off the cable. I knew I wouldn’t fall, but knowing is one thing, reality is another. There’s no rush of wind to give me the feel of motion. My pressurized suit keeps the emptiness of space at bay. I’m free, free as a bird. I laugh.

“Mr. Villafranca, you all right?” the voice in my headset asks.

I take hold of the anchoring cable again and swung back and forth to give the camera implanted in the back of my head a three-sixty view through the helmet’s dorsal viewport. I’d rehearsed a shooting schedule before leaving the shuttle. Now, on the inspiration of the moment, I twirl, my movements at once constrained by the bulky spacesuit and wonderfully freed from the limitation of gravity. 

I kick. Against what? I spin hand over hand, the cable a pole I can vault over.

Now I’m dizzy, a purely emotional reaction. My orientation shouldn’t matter to the flow of blood within my body, should it? I’m cradled by my suit like a child in the womb.

image: pixabay

“Mr. Villafranca, you must come aboard.” The voice in the headset. Then softer, like the captain damped the volume without realizing it’s still on, “Jesus, we’ve got ourselves a head case out there.”

“Sorry, captain. It’s just so wonderful. I couldn’t imagine.”

The headset cuts out completely, probably letting Gaia’s captain express himself in ways he doesn’t want transmitted to mission control.

“Yes, Mr. Villafranca, it’s wonderful.” Nguyen’s lost his drawl completely. “But we’ve got two vehicles trying to stay synched at twenty-seven hundred kph, and we don’t want to leave anybody behind. So we’d all appreciate you coming aboard.  Pronto.”

***

“Captain Nguyen, I presume?”

I’m bobbing gently in the microgravity of the Gaia’s closed airlock, helmet unclipped. I reach for the captain’s hand, miss, start to upend. “Sorry. Haven’t got my space legs yet.”

The captain steadies me. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Villafranca.”   

“Call me Max. Hope I’m not the worst passenger you’ve had.”

“No, sir, not at all. At least you got your own ass−excuse the language, purely a technical phrase─got across the cable on your own power. There’s been some we had to sedate and haul in.”

“It probably is a nuisance, me dropping in like a tourist.”

“Not a tourist, Mr. Villafranca, that is, Max. A partner. Although you’re the first artist we’ve had on board Gaia. And I’ve got to say, that’s quite a tattoo you’ve got there.”

“Want a closer look? Designed it myself. They had to shave my head for the camera implant so I thought, hey, why not tattoo another face around the camera port?”

I turn. “Smile, captain.” I imagine a click of the tiny shutter, the look on Nguyen’s face as the camera lens nestled within the Cyclops design on the back of my skull winks a picture.