Outer Alliance Spotlight #45: Retro Spec August 27, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews, publications, queer-friendly publishers , trackbackWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #45. Each week the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guests this week are Karen Romanko, CD Covington, and Leonard Richardson, the editor and two of the contributors to Retro Spec: Tales of Fantasy and Nostalgia from the 20th Century.
Karen Romanko is a poet and fantasy writer, who loves the sun of Los Angeles and Malibu. She edited the speculative fiction webzine, Raven Electrick for several years, and has edited two previous anthologies, Sporty Spec and Cinema Spec. Her poetry and fiction and have appeared in many places including Strange Horizons and Ideomancer.
CD Covington is a fantasy and science fiction writer who also enjoys tai chi, crochet, and European football (she is particularly interested in the German Bundesliga). She maintains a twitter feed in addition to her blog. “U* Alexanderplatz (1989)” is her first publication.
Leonard Richardson is a writer and computer programmer. His programming books, RESTful Web Services and The Ruby Cookbook were published by O’Reilly, and his story, “Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs” appeared in Strange Horizons. Together with his wife, Sumana Harihareswara, he edited the anthology Thoughtcrime Experiments in 2009.
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OA: Retro Spec is your third anthology (the first two being Sporty Spec and Cinema Spec). How did you get into the themed anthology idea in the first place, and how do you choose the themes?
KR: I published e-zine Raven Electrick for nine years, but started to feel that something was missing. There was a kind of unity there, but not the feeling of having created a WHOLE that I get from editing and publishing anthologies on a theme, where I work hard to achieve cohesion. That feeling is also reinforced by being able to hold the finished products in my hands, something I couldn’t do with the e-zine. (Yes, I’m aware that I moved backwards in terms of current publishing trends.)
As to the themes, I’ve chosen ones of personal interest to me because I think that editorial enthusiasm is important. At the same time, I’d like to sell some books, so I’ve tried to stick to themes that authors will find inspiring and that readers will want to see treated.
With Retro Spec, I called upon my long-ago history major and my continued interest in retro popular culture. The most interesting aspect of submissions was that the most popular decade was the 30s–I’d expected something more recent.
OA: As an editor, how do you encourage diversity in submissions to your publications? Are there themes or stereotypes you see too much of? What about things you’d like to see more of?
KR: I like to encourage submissions from women, because they’re underrepresented in the sf/f/h field (and in most professions). That’s one of the reasons why I joined Broad Universe.
In general, my submitters tend to be an enlightened group. (I do request in the guidelines that they not submit anything sexist or racist.) My main complaint is that too many horror writers tend to ignore my caveat about “no gore.”
OA: Are there more Spec anthologies in your future? What else can we look forward to from you?
KR: I hope so. I’ve selected the theme for the next one, but I’m keeping that a secret for the time being. 
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OA: Your story is set in East Berlin just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Why did you choose to write about that particular time and place?
CDC: The last decade of the Cold War influenced me as a child, but its end and the collapse of the Soviet Union were really the first politics I was *aware* of. I started studying German in fall 1989, when I was in 8th grade, then before Thanksgiving break, Germany had changed. Every year on November 9, I watch the video for the Scorpions’ “Winds of Change” with footage from 1989 and 1990. (I feel like I shouldn’t admit that in public, but there you go.)
My first trip to Berlin was for three days in 1997. I remember taking the train across town and being able to discern where the Wall had been. The style of building changed a bit, and there was a lot more construction, but the difference was palpable.
I went back for a week at Christmas 2007. The division line wasn’t nearly as noticeable, but construction hadn’t stopped. (In Berlin, there’s always construction.) This time, I went on a guided tour, and the tour guide was a student of Cold War history, so we got onto that topic fairly often. He asked if I’d heard of Geisterbahnhöfe, ghost stations, and I said I hadn’t. He directed me to more information, which I picked up gladly.
Brief explanation: The city of Berlin wasn’t divided strictly on a north-south line. The Soviet sector had a slight bulge into the western sectors. Transit lines that had been built thirty or forty years (or more, in the case of the street-level trains) before that connected the northern boroughs with the southern now went from West to West through the East. The ruling party in East Germany couldn’t allow trains to stop, because people would be able to escape easily. So they barricaded these dozen stations on three lines, and made the Friedrichstraße station a border crossing point.
I’ve always been drawn to abandoned places and ruins. I knew there was a story in there, but it took me a while (and a lot of false starts) to find it. I wrote about a pair of guards stationed in the sealed-off U8 track at Alexanderplatz, one of whom keeps seeing trains and passengers who shouldn’t be there.
Since Karen bought my story, I’ve spent a month in Berlin, for a refresher German course. I worked on a translation of it, and my teacher really liked it. She’s lived in Berlin since the 80s, and she remembers the guards stationed in subway stations.
OA: As an Outer Alliance member, you support and celebrate LGBTQI themes in speculative fiction, but that doesn’t always mean writing queer lit. Part of being a supportive ally is simply reading, enjoying, and recommending good stories. Can you recommend a favorite or two to us?
CDC: I’m a fan of (fellow OA member) Lynn Flewelling‘s work. The lack of queer SF on my shelves is kind of embarrassing.
OA: What’s next for you? Are you working on anything new and exciting?
CDC: I just submitted a short story to an anthology of military sf starring women, and I’m working on revisions to my novel. The main character of the short is one of the POV characters in the novel.
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OA: Your story is an alternate history piece about Alan Turing, an important figure in queer history, and in computing history. What led you to write this particular story?
LR: I was vacationing in England in 2009 when the British government issued its apology to Turing. A genuine apology is a kind of alt-history story: there’s this alternate timeline where I didn’t do this, and things are better in that timeline. There’s also something alt-history-ish that’s stuck with me from The Enigma, Andrew Hodge’s biography of Turing: how arbitrary his death was, how much flowed from one small action. There seems to be a causal chain from Turing reporting a burglary to the police in 1952, to his outing, his chemical castration, and his suicide in 1954. It’s difficult to imagine the British government of 1952 behaving differently than it did, but it’s not difficult to imagine Turing deciding not to report that burglary.
That’s where I got the jumping-off point. I wanted to explore how the world might have been different if Alan Turing had lived out a normal human lifespan, but also what the effect on him might have been of keeping that secret, keeping it even after it was okay to talk about the wartime secrets, and then wondering when it would be okay to give that last secret up.
OA: As an editor of an anthology yourself, how did you encourage diversity in the submissions you received? Is there anything you learned during the process of reading for Thoughtcrime Experiments that would change the way you solicited submissions if you were to do it again?
LR: I can’t really improve on what Sumana said in your interview of her. For detailed analysis I’d point people to that interview or her blog post on the topic. I’ll second her statement that we didn’t do as much as we could have to recruit nonwhite and queer authors by announcing the anthology in relevant places.
OA: Do you think you will ever put together another anthology? Have you got anything other exciting projects on the horizon?
LR: We don’t have any plans for another anthology, partly because our lives are way too hectic right now. But I think we could do another one, testing some other hypothesis about the market. Like “send in your latest ready-to-submit story” or something.
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Thanks, Karen, CD, and Leonard! Retro Spec is available now through Barnes & Noble and Amazon. There will be an official Retro Spec launch party at the Flintridge Bookstore and Coffee House in La Canada, California on the 25th of Spetember, and CD Covington will be reading from her Retro Spec story next weekend at Dragon*Con.
Comments»
[...] for 8/31/10 InterviewsPeter Orullian interviews Daniel Abraham.The Outer Alliance interviews Karen Romanko.Hour of the Wolf interviews Sybil's Garage (podcast).Betsy Mitchell interviews Harry [...]
I’m delighted to be a part of this anthology, and can’t wait for the launch party!
You can now read “The Day Alan Turing Came Out” at http://www.crummy.com/writing/The%20Day%20Alan%20Turing%20Came%20Out/ .
[...] it up on his own website. If you are curious about the background on this one, you can find a brief interview with Leonard as part of the OA Spotlight post about Retro [...]