John Scalzi: “You can’t make “Star Wars” today anymore”
John Scalzi, a US sci-fi writer who is very well known in Hungary. There are 8 translated books of his you can find in Budapest bookshops. Among them so famous as “Régi harcosok” (Old Man’s War), “A vörösingesek” (Redshirts), “A béke ára” (The God Engines) and “A Kaiju megőrzési társaság” (The Kaiju Preservation Society). This year the 9th book “Állati gonosz” (Starter Villain) was translated and presented at the Budapest Book Fair. I met John Scalzi to learn the secrets of his creative method.
Your blog has the motto “furiously reasonable”. What is the most furiously reasonable thing you’ve learned this year?
I learned about how people deal with each other online, because Twitter has become a toxic mess now since Elon Musk bought it. It’s made me think about how we interact with each other online, and how much of it is designed to make us angry, outraged, and sarcastic to each other. I’ve been posting on Blue Sky, a new social media platform that is focused on support and collaboration. When someone is obnoxious, I just block them. This new way of talking online is more reasonable. I can still be outspoken about what I believe in, but I don’t need to fight anymore. I can say what I want and have conversations, but I can also cut out obnoxious people entirely.
Everyone loves space operas. As a boy, I adored Star Wars, even though I was 16 when I saw it or the first time. That was in 1993, and even then, space operas were considered a bit outdated, something from the past. So, I was happy to read your novel “Redshirts,” in which space travelers realize that their lives and deaths depend on the whims of television script writers. I thought, “Finally, someone has noticed that it’s impossible to write a serious space opera today because it would look ridiculous! You need to have some distance from this style, to stand aside and chuckle softly, like the Netflix screenwriters do”. I mean, after everything that has happened since 1980, science fiction literature should look in some other way. Do you agree?
I think there is a place for the critical examination of science fiction tropes, such as in my novel “Redshirts”, that are often taken for granted in TV and popular movies and which look ridiculous and anachronistic today. It’s important to challenge these tropes and ask if they still make sense today. For example, if you’re writing science fiction today, you can’t just recycle the same ideas from the 1950s and 1960s. You have to update them for a modern audience.
However, I also believe that it’s possible to write updated space operas that appeal to modern readers. Authors like Ty Franck Turner and Daniel Abraham (their “The Expanse” science fiction series of novels) have done this by taking the basic bones of space opera and putting a new spin on them. They have made the stories more relevant to their audience without sacrificing the core elements of the genre.
The point is, we need to be mindful of the fact that times have changed and that our audience has changed. We can’t just keep rehashing the same old stories without any thought to what our readers actually want to read. If we do that, the science fiction genre will stagnate. You can’t make “Star Wars” today anymore, not because it’s forbidden. Just because everything that was exciting and fresh in 1970 are absolutely not exciting and fresh in 2023.
When I wrote “Redshirts”, I was partly pointing out some of the things I thought were ridiculous about science fiction TV and film. But I was also writing a love letter to the genre. I’m a science fiction writer, and I still love space opera. I have the “Old Man’s War” series and the “Interdependency” series. But I also believe that it’s important to respect our audience and understand that they are not the same audience that we had 20, 30, or 40 years ago.
That ironic approach reminded me of a story of James G. Ballard’s “Thirteen to Centaurus”. This short story takes place within a generation starship traveling to Alpha Centauri. But eventually it appears that the Station is in fact an Earth-bound experiment designed to test whether humans can survive a century-long flight to Alpha Centauri. All the crew members just have to live and die for 100 years underground without even knowing about the real state of affairs.
One of the fun things about writing “Redshirts” was being able to take the space opera tropes that have been taken for granted and deconstructing them, putting a new spin on them. For example, J.G. Ballard wrote a story where the characters didn’t know they were not on a space station. One of the reasons I wrote “Redshirts” was to say, “This is a new version of all the things we know and we’ve already done. Why are you still doing them?” Calling attention to them in some ways makes it more difficult for them to go back to the old way.
I used to be a film critic and worked for a newspaper. I spent so much time looking at so many movies and seeing so many of the tropes and ideas repeated over and over again. When you see that so often, your brain automatically rebels against them, right? Because you shouldn’t have seen it before and you want them to do something different and put a new spin on it.
I’ve had readers who said they read “Redshirts” and now every time they watch “Star Trek”, they recognize the things I pointed out and it changes their perspective on that. I think that for the people who are making TV series and movies and stuff like that, they’re aware now that they can’t get away with the same lazy work and they have to try new things because the audiences are too smart and know all their tricks. They have to think of new tricks.
Who are the redshirts, the persons who come up the scene for a very short time to entertain the audience, in our everyday life? Do they have some real prototypes in our society, politics?
Yes, there are always people that someone thinks is expendable. Old man’s war young mens fight. The people who come to the front line, being thrown to the war, just because some will expand ammunition on them and make it more difficult for them to keep the ground. There will always be young, poor and marginalized people which are considered by someone as expendable. In my book they are presented in a humorous fashion. But in a larger sense we are used to the idea that in every culture there are people who just don’t matter, they just don’t count.
Reading your novel I had an impression that you managed to be serious telling such mocking parody. What do you think, maybe it is a feature of our time, our style of life?
Black humor has always been a tool for writers. It’s a way to crack jokes at the darkest moments, and it’s been part of the human condition for as long as humans have had desperate times. I don’t think I’m doing anything particularly different with black humor. I think I do it because the generations that are alive now, especially the younger ones, have to cope with a lot of messed-up things in the world. They don’t know any other way to process it, or maybe they do have other ways of processing it, but humor makes it hurt less.
I also like to write black humor because I’m good at it. It’s something I enjoy doing. But I also find that it makes it easier for me to communicate heavier topics to people. If you’re always serious, people will eventually tune you out. But if you can make them laugh at the same time you’re presenting these issues, the laughter catches them off guard and makes it easier for them to take in the more serious idea you’re trying to convey.
So I write humor because I’m good at it and because it makes it easier for me to talk about things that are important to me. I also hope that by talking about these things, people will be more likely to entertain the ideas, even if they don’t agree with them.
Hungarian readers really liked your novel “Kaiju Preservation Society” and are comparing it to the movie Jurassic Park. But at the same time, they note that Jurassic Park is a serious film, and the “Kaiju Preservation Society” is full of parody and irony. Not all of your jokes are understandable there, because some of them are rooted in American culture. But did you really intend “Kaiju Preservation Society” as a parody of dinosaur blockbusters? Why do you think such a parody of a popular genre is necessary?
I don’t think it’s necessary to have a complex reason for everything I write. I wrote “The Kaiju Preservation Society” in five weeks because I had another book deadline and the idea suddenly popped into my head. I didn’t think about it at all before I started writing it.
In the book, the characters are teachers who know a lot about monsters. One of them even jokes about how they wanted to say “Welcome to Jurassic Park!” when they first saw the giant monsters in the new world. This is because everyone knows about “Jurassic Park”, and it’s part of their common knowledge.
What was interesting for me in both “The Kaiju Preservation Society” and “Redshirts” was taking the clichés we have about monsters and examining them closely. For example, giant monsters couldn’t exist in the real world because they would collapse under their own weight due to the square-cube law (the mathematical principle that, as a shape grows in size, its volume grows faster than its surface area, and some very large animals just can’t exist). So, how do you create a giant monster that doesn’t violate the laws of physics? You have to reimagine it completely.
Part of my process as a writer is to take tropes and ideas and find plausible reasons for them to exist. In doing so, you gain a new understanding of the world. And humor just comes naturally to me. I think everyone enjoys humor, not only because it’s funny, but also because it’s a part of the human experience. So, humor is going to be a part of my books, even if they’re set in a world with monsters. I want my books to have the human experience in them, even if they’re about monsters.
Also you said about Kaiju that you try to observe physical laws in literature so that the reality that you picture was possible in the real world. There was an example about Kaiju, because they are too huge to really exist. They would just collapse in reality. But, in my opinion, writing sci-fi it’s just impossible to observe all these laws, because there would never be 90% of sci-fi literature. I mean, that sci-fi is mostly written for people who usually don’t even expect that all these physical laws will be observed in the books they read. They just need an interesting plot and bright imagination. But to what extent do we really need to observe physical laws in literature?
I disagree that science fiction writers don’t have to be careful with the physics in their stories. Many science fiction readers are scientists themselves, so if you get the known science wrong, it will throw them out of the story.
For me, there are two parts to writing science fiction. First, you need to get the known science right. This means that when you take the next step and speculate, your readers will be more likely to buy into it, because they know that you have a good understanding of science.
Second, you need to respect your readers. Many science fiction readers are smart people who understand the basics of science, so you need to make sure that you get the things that they know are correct.
Now, not everyone is like this. Some people just watch science fiction and don’t care about the accuracy of the science. For example, in “Star Wars”, there is sound in space, even though there is no sound in space in real life. But that’s okay, because “Star Wars” is not a documentary. It’s a fun movie, and it would be much less interesting without sound.
So, the point is that you need to know your audience and write for them. If you’re writing for a science-savvy audience, you need to be careful with the physics. But if you’re writing for a more general audience, you can be more flexible.
If the directors of sci-fi films obeyed all the laws of physics, their films would be very boring, there would be no sounds in space, most of the time nothing would happen on the screen, and all the battles in space would take place either too long or too fast, so that nothing would be possible to understand.
Nobody wants science fiction to be like the “Dogme 95” (the movement of ultra-realistic cinema without special effects — O.Sh.). I agree, but I also think that it’s important to get the science right as much as possible. Of course, you can always take some liberties and pick and choose where you want to be more or less realistic.
But for me, when I’m writing about things like traveling from one planet to another or creating giant monsters, I want to build up everything to such a point that people believe that I understand what I’m talking about. And when I start to make things up, I want them to be willing to go along with me because they know that I’ve done my homework.
There are many people who are very passionate about science fiction and will argue with you until they’re blue in the face about things like whether lightsabers are possible or whether warp drive from “Star Trek” is actually feasible. I don’t want them to be thinking about those things all the time while they’re reading my book. I want them to think about it after they’ve finished the book. If I can get them through the book without them saying, “Wait a minute, that doesn’t make sense,” then I’ve succeeded.
In other words, I want to get the science right as much as possible, but I also want to write a story that is fun and engaging. I don’t want my readers to be nitpicking science every step of the way.
While writing Kaiju Preservation Society you said that you broke a deadline. Do you have some average terms for novel writing? Like “one novel in 10 months or so?”
Generally speaking I can write a novel in about three or four months. So that’s my usual length. The longest I’ve taken to write a novel was 11 months and the shortest time I’ve taken to write a novel was two weeks. I can write 8000 words a day for two weeks. I don’t recommend it. It’s a very bad time.
6 years ago Netflix acquired the movie rights to your novel cycle “Old Man’s War”. 3 years ago you wrote “it still might not happen”. 5 months ago you wrote “it’s still in development… Old Man’s War has been in development one way or another since 2008”. I am a bit confused. What’s going on? When can we wait for this movie? Do you know some details?
I can confirm that there is a script for an “Old Man’s War” movie, and we are in talks with a director. Other than that, it’s all a waiting game. It took 30 years for “Dune” to be made into a movie, and then another 30 years for it to be remade. “Starship Troopers” took 40 or 50 years to be made. And “The Sandman”, which finally got a TV series, was in development for over 20 years. So the fact that “Old Man’s War” has been in development for 15 years is not actually that unusual for Hollywood.
The good thing for me is that the producers have to keep paying for the option to make the movie. So, in a way, my daughter went to college on “Old Man’s War” options. I would love for them to make the movie, but I’m not worried about it in the meantime.
I adore the “Love, Death & Robots” Netflix episodes after your stories, especially “Alternate Histories”, when after Russians invented gelatin-encasing weapon Vladimir Putin, as one of the consequences, became the first man on the Moon. Of course, I understand, it’s a joke. And we, Ukrainians, also have a joke about it: “Did you hear, Russians flew to the Moon? — Everybody?” But do you really believe that a super-weapon and certain people can change history? What can we expect from Putin now after he did not become the first man on the Moon?
We already know that a super weapon can change history. The Americans dropped the bomb on the Japanese and they surrendered at the end of World War II. So that is something that we know could absolutely happen now.
When I was talking about the gelatin-encasing weapon, I was obviously being sarcastic and funny, not serious. But yes, even small things can have big consequences. For example, the reason Franz Ferdinand was assassinated was that the assassins were originally going to make the attempt, but then they didn’t. Then the assassin went to get a sandwich, and then he just happened to be in the place where Franz Ferdinand’s carriage was passing by. So if he hadn’t gone to get a sandwich, the entire course of history would have been changed.
As for what is going on with Putin and what will happen in Ukraine, I have no idea. I’m kind of hoping that whatever his plans are, he will be disappointed.
You write “I became a published novelist, and the way I did that was through my blog “Whatever”. What does a writer do to repeat your success now? Is it possible at all? How did you start your blog “Whatever” technically? Somebody helped you with programming? What is the difference between blogging then and today? I suppose it is a number of readers, of course, but what else?
When I started writing 25 years ago, I had to learn UNIX and HTML in order to create a website and pages. I was all on my own, typing code in a very elegant way. But these days, you don’t have to do that. Blogs have come and gone, and now there are other types of social media.
The thing I did, posting my first book on the blog for free and then having an editor find it, is not likely to be replicated because today it is a completely different time. But what is true is that there will always be new media, and people will find ways to bring attention to themselves on that media and then get their books published.
What publishers like is knowing that there is a built-in audience for whatever book that is that they are going to write. So the mechanism of people becoming famous through social media or through music or through movies and therefore publishers want to buy a book from them has not changed.
It would be more difficult for someone to do that with a blog now because blogs are passing away. But that said, I’m happy that I’m still writing my blog after 25 years.
Maybe that’s a lot harder to do today, with the oversaturation of blogs and social media, compared to 25 years ago when you were one of a hundred, if not a dozen, writers online.
Things always change. That’s why you wouldn’t do it the same way now. But what hasn’t changed is that publishers like a built-in audience. They’re always interested in people who can bring people to the book, instead of the other way around.
I think the smartest way for people to get a book published is still the old-fashioned way: submit it and get an agent. I was able to get a book this way, and a few other people have too. But many other people have gotten books by following the submission guidelines.
I’m an anecdote, an outlier. So are the people who got their cookbooks published because they became extremely popular on YouTube. For every person who got their books published because of YouTube or TikTok, there are 10,000 people who didn’t.
So the best way to do it is to do it the way they’ve set up for you: submit books.
I see on your Twitter your cartoon style image with a big judge mallet. What are you aiming for? What is your target? And the serious part of this question: is a writer can only entertain his audience or he must have more responsible tasks like to solve some serious problems? Do you believe that you can crush some real enemies with your hammer?
The image is from the cover of my book, “The Mallet of Loving Correction”. It refers to my blog, “Whatever”. I write pieces on the blog and people can comment on them. I have very specific rules for the comment thread. If I have to remove someone’s comment or deal with it in some way, I call it “mowing it”.
When I post something on my blog, I also have a responsibility to make sure that the conversation that happens on my site does not go off the rails. I don’t want it to be full of people shouting, calling each other names, or being rude. There is a responsibility that comes with having a platform to make sure that the conversation is one that you manage in a larger sense.
I think there is nothing wrong with the idea that an author can entertain. I also think there is nothing wrong with the idea that occasionally an author can do more than that. They can take a position, make a statement, or say what they believe in and encourage other people to think about their own preconceptions.
In the course of my career over three decades, there have been times when I have said that something is important to me or that there is something specific that I want to say. This has had an impact.
I think you can have both. You don’t always have to just entertain and you also don’t always have to be serious. There is a time and a place for both.
Do you know that all your Russian translated novels are available online for free? What do you think about it?
When the Russian-Ukrainian war started, I instructed my agent not to sell my books in Russia for the duration of the war. I also said that any money I would be getting from Russia would go to charities that help the Ukrainian people.
So, the fact that my books are available for free in Russia simply means that nobody is making a profit from them, not me and not a publisher in Russia right now. I don’t have a problem with that.
