10 Questions with Hugo Award Winner Laura J. Mixon (@LauraJMG)
This Author Spotlight
features
LAURA J. MIXON
author of
Glass Houses
SF novelist and Hugo-winning blogger Laura J. Mixon wrote her first story for her own amusement at age eight. At age 11, she discovered science fiction in the local library and never looked back. Her popular SF thriller Up Against It came out from Tor Books (as M. J. Locke) in 2011 and is due for re-release soon as part of an upcoming trilogy. Set among the asteroids, it is the first book of WAVE, a series of novels
about savvy and desperate people (and other beings) living in a future, settled solar system.
Author of six novels and assorted shorter works, including the highly acclaimed cyberpunk trilogy AVATARS DANCE (Glass Houses, Proxies, and Burning the Ice).
She and fellow SF writer Steven Gould stabbed the cake/tied the knot at WeddingCon in early 1989. They have collaborated on one novel and two world-class daughters, now grown (who might even be spotted wandering the halls of certain cons and costuming events). They now live in New Mexico with their daughters.
She is an environmental engineer and served two years in Kenya in the Peace Corps. Her work is often associated with the cyberpunk movement, and has been the focus of academic studies on the intersection of technology, feminism, and gender. She is a graduate of the Clarion writing workshop and an instructor at the Viable Paradise genre writing workshop on Martha's Vineyard. She blogs occasionally at laurajmixon.com and feralsapient.com and tweets as @LauraJMG.
1.How did you get
into writing and why do you write?
I grew up in the late sixties and early seventies in a
neighborhood with a lot of kids, and my favorite game was Pretend. We were a roving pack of AR players, back when AR was all
in your head. We riffed off of Star Trek, Land of the Giants, Lost in Space,
and the Avengers (the British spies version with Diana Rigg, ohmigod) and The
Man /Girl from U.N.C.L.E, those creepy
Saturday matinees like The Twilight Zone and The Man with Xray Vision. We had
the best adventures.
The one thing that really bugged me, though, was that I had
no control over the plot. The other kids all had their own ideas about what was
supposed to happen, and when I’d say, for instance, “Bang! You’re dead,” they’d
jump back up and say, “No, I’m not!” So
I started writing my stories down.
Little did I know what I was letting myself in for; my own
characters have even LESS desire to behave. Hah!
2.What do you like
best (or least) about writing?
I think it’s the same thing that drew me to Pretend when I was a kid. That desire to
be transported into another world. To be surprised by the unexpected things
that happen to my characters, and how they respond. That sense of wonder and
delight you get when everything seems chaotic and out of control, and suddenly it
all clicks into place and you see that deeper pattern.
3.What is your
writing process? IE do you outline? Do you stick to a daily word or page count,
write 7 days a week, etc?
For the world building, I tend to put a lot of work into
research and design. For the characters and plot, I’m a mostly-pantser. I have
a few high points I know I want to hit, but the main pleasure I get from
writing comes from being surprised by what I discover as I write.
4.Who are some other
writers you read and admire, regardless of whether they are commercially “successful?”
Oh, my God, there are so many great writers out there!
The other writers in this bundle are all pretty awesome. My
husband Steve and I have always been fans of Lisa Mason, Linda Nagata, and
Walter Jon Williams, and now I’ve bought the AI Storybundle and am eager to
read yours and Kathleen Ann Goonan’s as well.
I also had the pleasure of being on the Philip K. Dick jury a
couple of years ago, and discovered several writers I loved. I could go on and
on about all six of the books on the nominees list. We had a hard time
narrowing the list down to six. Here’s
the list. You’re in for a treat!
You have to check out the winner, Meg Elison’s The Book of the Unnamed Midwife. And the
special citation winner, Jennifer Marie Brissett’s Elysium, blew my freakin mind. So much creativity in the
worldbuilding, characters I loved, and masterful control over her prose. Highly
recommended.
I also love Cory Doctorow’s stuff. His Little Brother series is magnificent. For the Win made me cry my eyes out.
Martha Wells’s Raksura series is sooooo goooood. Anything by
Nalo Hopkinson.
Marko Kloos’s Frontlines series, and Curtis Chen’s Waypoint Kangaroo. Charlie Jane Anders’s All the Birds in the Sky.
And Andrea Hairston’s fantasies! She has a new one out, Wild Do Magic for Small Change. Wonderful.
5.Should the question
mark in the above question be inside or outside the quotes?
Outside, dammit! sayeth the engineer. The writer in me shrugs;
whatever—I’m in it for the fun and glory and adventure. Just be consistent with
that punctuation stuff and use it to tell a great story, and I’m yours.
6.What’s your stance
on the Oxford Comma?
Pro. I’ll fight you.
7.What is your book Glass Houses about and how did it come
to fruition?
It was an out-take—a sort of side story—that emerged while I
was writing Proxies, my novel in the
same series. Ruby Kubick, a lesbian waldo operator who used her robotic drones
to avoid going outside or interacting with anyone in person, sprang to life in
my head, and she just wouldn’t go away. But her story didn’t fit inside the
other work, which was already too big. So I gave her her own story.
Ruby is a young woman in a future, drowned New York City,
about a century or so from now. She has direct brain interface tech, which she
uses to control a set of junkyard robots, and uses them to scrape out a living
doing salvage. On one operation during a storm, she discovers a wealthy man who
got stranded in a decrepit high-rise. She attempts to rescue him, and things go
badly awry from there…
It’s a noir-ish mystery-adventure, and also a story about
Ruby, who has fallen for a woman who doesn’t love her back, working on how to
take control of her own fate, and get out of this trap she’s in, this sticky
web of life circumstances and choices she’s made whose consequences she couldn’t
have predicted.
8.What’s your current
writing project?
Thanks for asking! :D I have a few nifty projects I’m having
fun with.
My publisher and I want to do at least two more books in my
Wave series, along with a re-release of the first book, Up Against It. The series is about a middle-future, partially-settled
solar system, with rogue AI and humans of various sorts trying to survive. UAI
starts with a disaster that puts the asteroid colony at risk, and turns into a
political thriller. It’s sometimes compared to James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse, as their book and mine came
out about the same time and feature asteroids and rogue tech and races against
time… nyeh heh heh…
I’m also nearly done with a near-future SF novel about the
space race to Mars, and a young woman who gets caught up in the events. It’s
called Child Left Behind.
I read an early draft of the first few scenes back in 2013 at
SF in SF (SF in SF, if you haven’t heard of it, is a sort of
happy-hour—interviews and readings—style event hosted by Terry Bisson and
organized by Rina Weisman and Rick Kleffel. It is a BLAST, and if you’re ever
in the Bay area, definitely go).
Here’s
Rick’s write-up about our event (my entry’s the
second one down), and if you want a taste of my work in progress (nearly done
now!), you
can hear me read an
early version of the first chapter here.
I’ve also been working on a cool project in George R.R.
Martin’s Wild Cards universe, but am sworn to secrecy there, for now… I’ll let
you know when and if I can reveal the details!
9.What book(s) are
you currently reading?
One of the great perqs of being a writer is knowing other
writers—which means having access to works hot off the writer’s keyboard! I’ve
managed to snare an advance reading copy of Annalee
Newitz’s Autonomous, which
I’ve just started.
Up next is Nalo
Hopkinson’s The
Blackheart Man. I’d gotten to read snippets of it while
she was working on it, so I’m very excited to read the finished work!
10.Who or what
inspires your writing?
The people who came before. Ursula K. LeGuin and Samuel R.
Delany and Robert A Heinlein and Clifford D. Simak and C.L. Moore. Bradbury and
Asimov and Williamson and Butler. Tanith Lee and Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells
and so many others. Their stories helped me know how much bigger and weirder
and full of wonders the world was than I could ever have imagined, at a time
when I desperately needed to know that.
The people coming up now. Newer writers, young and old,
emerging into the spotlight of readers’ attention—people of so many cultural
backgrounds and identities that have been under-represented in the past, beginning
to achieve recognition after being kept in the shadows for far too long.
Telling new stories. Showing us thrilling new ways to tell the old ones.
The people who will come after.
I believe the literature of the fantastic is not just
unbelievably cool and fun to read; it also plays a crucial role in helping
guide us in our efforts to curate a multi-cultural, sustainable future. An
ecologically healthy planet, a future welcoming and plentiful, with room for
all our hopes and dreams.
So yeah. All that mushy “boldly-go-holding-hands” stuff.
Finally, is there
anything you’d care to add? Please also include where people can read your
published stories, buy your book, etc.
Nope, all good! You can get copies of my Avatars Dance
series, as well as Up
Against It, which I wrote as M. J. Locke, as e-books on
Amazon or iTunes or Barnes and Noble. I have a novelette about climate change, “True
North,” in Welcome
to the Greenhouse, as M. J. Locke, and I’m on Twitter, mostly
ranting about fascists these days (mixed in with the occasional cool science
gif, photo, or link and book squee), as @LauraJMG. Stop by and say hey.
Thank you, Laura, for all the info, links, and insight! Please visit again when UAI, Child Left Behind, and the GRRM top-secret project is/are ready! We'd love to learn more.
Be sure to see Laura's Glass Houses in the Artificial Intelligence StoryBundle if it's still available. Otherwise, visit her online and anywhere books are sold!
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