Shaman interviews & reviews II

Shaman interviews & reviews Shaman interviews & reviews III

Shaman interviews & reviews II

SHAMAN has been out for a few months now, in hardcover. Shaman is also out as an audiobook: Hachette, Ambling Books, ... It is read by Graeme Malcolm.

Stan was interviewed for Focus, an Illinois radio. Listen to him talk about his Mars trilogy and Shaman, and reminisce extensively about authors that inspire him, Ursula Le Guin and Gene Wolfe.

Stan participated in an online Q&A chat at Firedoglake Book Salon
-- a nice way to interact with the author directly. The questions and
answers are many and the whole chat long to go through, but extremely informative; Stan's answers
only can be read here. Some interesting bits below:

On science fiction writing and worldbuilding:

They are similar processes, in that they are both settings and
societies that don’t exist now, and so there has to be enough
information in the text for the reader to be able to envision them.
So this is a particular method of novel writing that includes
description as well as dramatized action, and it has to be fitted
into the story gracefully, if possible.

The paleolithic culture is one that really existed but which we
have to infer from very few remnants. A future society has not yet
existed, but presumably will still have elements of now that we know
well. So the absences that have to be filled in are different in
nature, but both require an effort of imagination on the part of both
writer and reader.

I’ve been interested in the paleolithic humans for a long time.
It’s part of my science fiction project; if you try to imagine what
humanity could become, you have to think about what we are now, and
how we became what we are–and that gets you back to the
paleolithic, where we evolved to what we are.

So I’m interested in sociobiology as a kind of sf science,
speculative about our deep primate nature and its effects on us now.

The fact that these people had the same genome we do is so very
suggestive; it means culture is very important, and also that we
might choose deliberately to live in ways that give us the best of
the paleolithic experience.

I think the last line of Loon’s wander is one of the great last
lines I have come up with, because we suddenly have to recalibrate
Loon’s age, and it should be a big surprise. But they had to grow
up fast.

On the setting of Shaman:

This all takes place near what is now Vallons
Pont d’Arc in the Ardeche region of France, near the Chauvet cave
and the stone arch over the river nearby.

Then also my characters trek up to the caribou steppes of northern
France, and also eventually get to the dry land of the English
strait, and the ice cap of the Ice Age itself, sitting on southern
England.

One way I think it’s more like 300 miles, but that trip is
unusual. I do posit a traveling and nomadic culture, but their usual
annual trek is more like 200 miles round trip; then there is an
emergency.

On research for Shaman:

I mostly read about these people but I
did try knapping stone and starting fires, and I spend a lot of time
backpacking where the activities are often similar. Snow camping is
also a technique. What I found interesting about the ice man was that
the design of his gear kit was so similar to mine in the mountains.
Different materials but same designs for same functions.

A lot of this story came to me as I wrote the book; more so than
usual with me. I knew the situation I wanted, and the relationships
at the beginning, the apprentice shaman and the old shaman and the
herb woman. I was thinking “first scientist” and “first artist”
and how culture was passed along so stably for thousands of years.
First is not the right word here, as by the time my people were
around the culture had been going for thousands of years. But you see
how I began. Then the story grew from there.

I wish the First Peoples in North America had a bigger presence in
the national consciousness. They have a particular wisdom to bring, a
long view, a relationship to the land, and to other people. I think
it’s real, although when you’re young it’s hard to sort out
feelings of this sort. It’s a bit overwhelming.

On Shaman and oral cultures:

When I fully grasped how huge a consciousness changer literacy is,
and how well their oral transmission had to be; and also what oral
transmission entails (which is not exactly word-by-word memorization,
but more patterns and stories and habits of mind, and proverbs) the
book completely changed, and the narrator, the third wind, began to
speak the book rather than write it. So I got a different narrator
with a different style, but also, the book had to be about that
process.

Even after all the work and thinking, I still think it is deeply
mysterious how people managed to do it–to keep a culture going for
hundreds of generations. It’s occurred to me that the lack of
literacy actually helped enable that, somehow. That writing would
have destabilized, as it still does. But it’s still mysterious.

As to the terms for sexual parts and acts, I had to think about
that for a long time and finally give up on English, because all the
words were too weighted with baggage of one kind or another. They all
sounded wrong, modern. All the language of the book had to be
examined, but there the modern weights and prejudices were so extreme
that I reverted to Basque, proto-IndoEuropean, and metaphors from
nature.

I tried to use only the words they would have, but thinking also
they had full language, with abstracts, but all coming from their own
situation.

So I didn’t use the word “fact” for instance, which I find
my narrators often used (“In fact,”….) Many like that. But
these people didn’t have facts as we understand that term.

It was a big exercise in linguistics and word definitions, also
cultures and philosophies and what they knew in their lives back
then.

Mama mia! I was so happy when a recent article stated that
historical linguists have determined that mama is one of the oldest
words in any language, a kind of sound happy babies make; and I/my
was really ancient too. I was just trying to suggest they would have
phrases from older languages around, other languages, and that it was
a Mother Earth religion where you would want an equivalent to OMG!!
but in the context of a Mother Earth religion. So it was a joke but I
meant it to work too. Actually it has thrown quite a few readers out
of the text, so maybe too much of a joke. But many of our old
commonplaces phrases are probably thousands of years old.

I think there may have been remnant
tales that lasted for thousand of years.

The swan wife story that Loon tells the shamans at the corroboree
is one of the oldest stories on Earth, found everywhere. I adapted
Loon’s from a Tlingit version and Gary Snyder’s version in his
Reed dissertation.

Also the story of the ten years without a summer that Thorn tells
early on, is my attempt to suggest that they were remembering the
disaster of 70,000 years ago, cause unknown, that reduced the human
population on Earth to perhaps 2,000 people, a thing we see by way of
the DNA bottleneck in the historical record of looking into our DNA
history! A new form of archeology, in effect.

And I was thinking, that Plato’s story of Atlantis and its
destruction was the story of Santorini blowing up in 1643 BC, about a
thousand years before Plato wrote it down, and perhaps an oral tale
all the time.

So I think some of these old stories (like the minotaur which I
also postulate in the book as ancient) are really old.

On writing and his ow novelistic style:

I’ve thought for some time now that
we love novels for different reasons, and one is to learn about how
it felt to live in different times and places; what people’s habits
were, what they did in daily life, and then what they thought and how
their feelings felt, but just in ordinary life.

Then we also want something more, which is when ordinary life
breaks down somehow and things go wrong or get strange or exciting;
and that’s plot. And we all love plot, and the hunger to turn pages
to know what comes next.

So, I think both are important. And in a prehistoric novel, I
thought it was important that daily life be fully established,
because for one thing, they didn’t have many of the plots we have
in modern life; the story was often the same, which was getting
enough food for winter, and doing all the basic paleolithc activities
of sustaining life and having families and so on. So, these are
events, but not plots. Then when plot comes, it could often be
catastrophic. Many plots are dealing with catastrophes to daily life
of one sort or another.

So, I have always done both, and have always disliked those novels
that are only plot. Thrillers, for instance; I don’t think they’re
that interesting.

So I am always testing the limits of readers’ patience here, I
guess, and many readers these days have almost no patience for that
kind of thing I do, especially in my own genre, science fiction.

So it’s a tension I deal with, and I can see that I have
especially fervent fans, and especially dismissive people who are not
fans.

I keep reminding myself that Proust’s novel is one of the
greatest of all, to encourage myself. And keep on trying to keep a
balance.

On what's next:

My next novel is going to be about a multi-generational starship,
actually.

But I don’t think they are going to work. I’m still working on
that idea.

It’s part of the thinking going on in 2312 and Shaman, and so I
think the three books will make a kind of argument for what we are
and what we can or should try to become in the future.

This is something my editor, Tim Holman, has been pointing out to
me; that these three books will make a kind of extended argument or
case.

He’s a great editor, I am so lucky to have him!

And he got me to say something I hadn’t realized, which is in
the little video clip of me on the internet, talking about Shaman;
that we now are living in a combination of the two books, that in a
sense we are already living 2312, whereas we are always living in
Shaman’s world too; that’s why now feels so weird and
disorienting. A nice thought!

Of course, reviews abound.

"Some" reviews below (beware of heavy spoilers in several!):