Welcome to my weekly Author Spotlight. I’ve asked a bunch of my author friends to answer a set of interview questions, and to share their latest work.
Today: Brenda W. Clough is the first female Asian-American SF writer, first appearing in print in 1984. Her latest work is a novel, A Deal in Her Pocket. A novelette, ‘Clio’s Scroll’, which appeared in Clarkesworld in July 2023. A historical novel A Door In His Head won the 2023 Diverse Voices Award. Her novella ‘May Be Some Time’ was a finalist for both the Hugo and the Nebula awards and became the novel Revise the World. Marian Halcombe, first in a series of 12 neo-Victorian thrillers appeared in 2021. Her complete bibliography is up on her web page, brendaclough.net.
Thanks so much, Brenda, for joining me!
J. Scott Coatsworth: How would you describe your writing style/genre?
Brenda W. Clough: I recently realized that what I often write is historical science fiction. This is distinguished from historical fantasy (Naomi Novik’s Napoleonic dragon novels, for example) or alternate history (like Stephen Stirling’s Draka books, or Harry Turtledove’s novels) or straight historical novels. The plots are fairly hard, meeting aliens or exoplanet adventure, but there’s a heavy historical component. Dante Alighieri meets a space alien, that kind of thing.
One of my problems from the marketing point of view is that I never do anything twice. Once I’ve finished writing a dozen Victorian thrillers or a time travel trilogy, I am done, and it’s off to woods and pastures new. If only I could stick to one popular genre, and write twenty horror novels or a lifetime of Regency romance, the works would be easier to market! But no, it doesn’t work like that for me.
JSC: What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever done in the name of research?
BWC: I went to Italy, and visited the village of San Casciano dei Bagni, up on a steep hill in Tuscany. This place is ‘dei Bagni’ because it has about 40 hot springs, some of which have been flowing for millennia. The Etruscans and Romans built a large bath and spa complex at the base of the cliff, which is now a major archaeological site. Augustus Caesar bathed there. And so did I, so that I could write this: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clough_07_23/ Wanna picture?
JSC: How long on average does it take you to write a book?
BWC: I’m really, really fast. I am comfortable writing a novel a year – this is from the first vague notion to the complete rewritten manuscript of about 100 thousand words. There have been years however when I’ve written THREE novels. This is really grueling, and I try not to do that. You can’t do anything else in your life, if you’re producing over 300 thousand words in 365 days. But when I’m hot, I’m really hot. It’s like driving a Porsche, I can hit 90 mph without difficulty.
JSC: Are there underrepresented groups or ideas featured if your book? If so, discuss them.
BWC: I began writing the Marian Halcombe Victorian thrillers because, at the outset, I felt that Wilkie Collins quit too soon. He had a hit novel, The Woman in White, fitted out with some dynamite characters including one of the first feminist heroines in literature. And he didn’t write more! Honestly, if you want something done right sometimes you just have to do it yourself. I wrote more about Miss Marian, fitting her out with a husband, family, and children plus every single Victorian plot trope I could cram in: lost cities in the jungle, Ruritanian nations convulsed by political turmoil, hidden guests in the attic of large manors in the English countryside, crocodiles, combat hippopotami, poison, train wrecks, anarchists.
But what these books really are is reminders. Each one is built around some titanic oppression of women that we mostly have forgotten about. That a woman’s husband doesn’t make the medical decisions now, hurray! That a woman can control her own money instead of having her father or brother sign off on everything, very good! We won those battles, but we’ve forgotten how bad it used to be. We mustn’t forget, because it’s possible to slide backwards. Ask the women in Afghanistan, if they can still go to college.
JSC: Are you a plotter or a pantser?
BWC: It is a spectrum, but I am way far over on the Pants side of the force. At the outset of a novel, I never plan anything. No character lists, time lines, battle maps, nothing. I write the first sentence, and away we go.
When I was writing The Cobra Marked King, I came to a paragraph and wrote these two words: “pine cone”. I was writing on a laptop, so I could touch the words on the screen. And when I tapped the screen, it was as if those two words wiggled. They were loose. I could get a fingernail underneath them, and look underneath. And it went down. There was another entire novel in there, down under those two words! Because I really had to finish the current work, I pushed them back into place and kept on going. But I marked the location, and later on I went back, popped ‘pine cone’ out, and pulled out another entire book.
JSC: How did you choose the topic for His Selachian Majesty Requests? What were your goals and intentions in this book, and how well do you feel you achieved them?
BWC: His Selachian Majesty Requests is part of a loose series titled the Cockeyed Optimists. They all take place between 1947 and 1980, and revolve around the impact of WW2 upon the characters and the world. In this book Cam See, the son of the war generation, is a singer-songwriter and a pop star. But he’s also combating the factory fishing fleets that are destroying the ocean ecology. My real intention was to write an SF novel, a first contact with alien life forms. That we’ve been putting them onto plates for years is an issue, yeah. But there’s been steady evidence mounting that we shouldn’t be eating whales or dolphins. We should be talking to them. And from ocean mammals to sharks is a short hop. Sharks, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll!
JSC: Who has been your favorite character to write, and why?
BWC: Cam is unquestionably fascinating. He’s volatile, prey to substance abuse (all good rock stars are, right?), an artist thrust into a sphere where he’ll never become competent. And in spite of all this he’s a genuinely good man. All my male heroes are. I don’t write abusive mean men, I’m trying to create a new paradigm. Cam is good-hearted. He becomes an excellent monarch, a loving husband, and attentive father. He listens, probably too much, to the advice of wiser and more experienced people. Oh, and most importantly, he’s a singer-songwriter. It’s hard to write convincingly about music – all I can put down on the page is the lyrics. But Cam is hugely creative, and becomes a major figure in popular music. The world he creates by the time the book ends in 1980 is a better one than we are sitting in right now. In the 1960s and 70s we believed that music could change the world. We can look around and see that it didn’t. But in this book, it did.
JSC: As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I don’t remember resolving it, but I was always going to be a writer. And in this I have anecdotal proof. When I was about 12, my parents threw a party. It was for grown-ups, up in the living room drinking martinis. We kids went downstairs to the rec room and watched cartoons. But some friend of my mother teetered downstairs to see us, and she cried, “And what are you going to be when you grow up?” And I replied, “I’m going to write novels.”
This took no root in my memory at all, – probably I was concentrating on ‘The Jetsons’. But a decade later I ran into this woman again on the DC Metro. She recognized me even though I of course didn’t recognize her (and in fact still do not know her name). We did that ‘yes, my parents are fine’ thing. Then she reminded me of what I had said, so charmingly precocious a child, and cried, “And did you become a writer?” And I pulled out my first novel, The Crystal Crown, just out from DAW Books.
So I must have known from a very early age!
JSC: What food(s) fuel your writing?
BWC: Well, coffee of course. Two espresso-sized cups a day and I am good to go. A case could be made that all of western civilization is built on caffeine. The Renaissance didn’t kick off until they began importing tea and coffee into Europe. The other key thing is carbs. Sugar! If I get stuck I go to Trader Joe’s and buy marshmallows dipped in dark chocolate. These go straight to the bloodstream and into the brain, like rocket fuel.
JSC: What are you working on now, and what’s coming out next? Tell us about it!
BWC: I have to finish a book I began 20 years ago, titled Off the Screen. It’s a sequel to How Like a God, and it’s about Edwin Barbarossa. Who, readers may recall, receives the gift of immortality. So he has plenty of time to do different things, and in this book he joins a team who is writing a Broadway musical…
And now for Brenda’s forthcoming book: His Selachian Majesty Requests:
Cam was sailing to rock stardom. He wrote a pop song that hit #24 on the Billboard charts in 1979! But when he drinks his big break away, his father ships him back to Asia to sober up. Now Cam’s marooned on an island in the South China Sea. He has to straighten out, right?
There Cam learns that, since his father was once the king, he could claim the island’s ancient title, the Shark Lord … if he learns to sing with the sharks. When he does, he discovers that sharks, all the major life in the ocean, are sentient. Sharks remember, repeat their history in their songs, and are intelligent. Supported by a local population yearning for the good old days, encouraged by men who may not be his friends, Cam becomes King and the Shark Lord of Singii. Everything goes his way now, the records topping the charts, the economy of the region reformed, world religions rethought, as he spearheads the defense of ocean ecology.
This makes him some powerful enemies. Sharks in oceans are pussycats, compared with the predators in international politics.
But his most dangerous enemy is in his own mirror. Cam’s got a lotta names, and one of them is addict…
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Excerpt
“Will you sing ‘Bus Stop Baby?’” a kid in front demanded, and from their table Sandy and Lisa clapped.
“Sure.” His fingers instinctively fell into the chord progression. The balance of sound between the instrument and the vocal sucked. But he sang the silly words of his first and only hit, a nonsensical love song that not even Del his manager had expected to rise to number 24 on Billboard’s Top 40 charts. “Awooo, ah wow, you’re my baby, my bus stop baby,” he crooned. If he knew he’d sing this every night of his life, he’d have put more work into the lyric.
But as usual everyone was delighted, and applauded like mad. However misguided, the audience’s approval lifted his heart. This was what he was born to do. “I’d be interested,” he said in Malay into the elderly mike, “if anyone in Singii recognizes this song. I heard it only the other day.” He’d adjusted the melody to better suit his vocal range, and rearranged the words:
Almost there, yeah
I found you,
I won’t let go
Almost there yeah
I got you safe
I missed you so
Felt like forever
Years without you
At last I found you
And now, oh now
We’re almost there.
On the radio, spinning on a turntable, the song might have been purely romantic. Twentieth century music was erected on romantic longing, hundreds of tuneful pleas to Lucille, Lida Rose, Michelle ma belle, Julia, Maria, Wendy and her runaway American dream. But here, looking down at the brown faces of the people, his people, a larger meaning loomed. Would he ever grasp it? Like an enormous cliff on the lee shore at night – he could sense the mass ahead of him even if he couldn’t see it, catch the distant boom of breakers on the rocks. This song was the first one on a different path, dangerous, even deadly.
Cam said yes to everything. He was volatile, he knew that. But most especially, music was tied to yes. He hadn’t dared to articulate his terror, that if he quit drinking, he’d lose the music. But now, sober, he’d written Jerung’s song, and it was a good one. The relief was so great, he wound it up with a show-offy little chord progression. You learned to clearly signal the audience when to applaud, and they did.