As a former MUD addict--I practically lived online from '95-'00, exploring the text-based virtual worlds of Dark Castle MUD--it is absolutely enthralling to find a fellow MUD player writing and publishing stories. Cat Rambo is an SF and Fantasy writer, a writing teacher, a former editor of Fantasy Magazine, and her new book You Sexy Thing is the next book you should read.
How has your work as an editor, including your time at Fantasy Magazine, informed your writing?
Certainly editing has made me a better writer, more attentive to the nuances of comma placement and sentence structure. But it's also made the way I work with editors different, I think, or at least helped me advance more quickly to the point where I understand what a difference a good editor can make, and how awesome an ally they can be in producing something that you're really proud of. For example, I had a story in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction earlier this year, "Crazy Beautiful," that I absolutely love, and it was C.C. Finlay's excellent edits that took it to the next level, in my opinion, including a major change that involved removing the vast majority of the quotes from art critics that I'd included and leaving only the Bob Ross quote that starts it off. Similarly, with You Sexy Thing, my editor, Chris Morgan caught all sorts of little snags and played a major part in making it the smooth read that it is (I think!)
The title of your latest book, You Sexy Thing, starts off a disco inferno in my mind, with "Do you believe in miracles?" and a disco beat kicking into high gear. Is this connection incidental or do you look for ways to create parallels to pop culture a la Julia Kristeva's intertextuality?
Like everyone, I swim in a sea of pop culture daily and am so steeped in it that much of my essence is pop culture references. And it's space opera, a manifestation of pop culture, so I get to both use and play with and subvert and occasionally celebrate all sorts of things about that genre. Science fiction isn't about the future; it's our world and times seen through a particularly interesting and complicated lens, and so it's inescapable. Just some authors are better at pretending intertextuality's not there than others.
What's more frightening, your worst dreams or a world without Ursula K. Le Guin?
Definitely a world without Ursula's dreams.
What should good science fiction do in the Rohrschaching twenties?
It should splinter and challenge, cajole and perplex, while drumming its own different tune.
Video games or table-top games?
Definitely table-top. I grew up playing RPGs at the local game/book store and just last weekend, got to play Isle of Cats with some old friends at that same store.
I discovered a table top gaming store tucked around the side of a shopping plaza in my town just this week and found people gathering for Magic, the gathering. In a Meta-branded world, it’s reassuring to find people logging out and going in common spaces to share experiences with others.Do you plan and organize your stories ahead of time or just kind of go?
I used to just go, but more and more I've fallen into planning as a form of procrastinating before writing.
You're in a generation spaceship with full nanotech capable of supporting your life processes for the next two billion years, as a conservative estimate. Where do you go? What's your mission?
I'm off in search of other intelligent life, so I can hear their stories and witness their art! How cool would that be?
That's the dream! Do you listen to music while you write?
I can't listen to music and write at the same time, but I listen while I'm doing the long walk beforehand that I use for thinking about stories. Usually I try to listen to music that's thematically connected to what I'm writing, so with this book, it was a lot of video game scores, like Mass Effect.
What book, along with You Sexy Thing, should we go read right now?
Read Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourself, but don't read any spoilers first.