Guy Gavriel Kay, author of the World Fantasy Award-winning novel Ysabel, is a writer steeped in myth and history. His books, deep and well-researched jewels that unfold like flowers as you read them, have earned him numerous awards, including a World Fantasy for Tigana and a Mythopoeic Fantasy for Adult Literature for The Summer Tree. Recently he talked with author (and fan) Alaya Dawn Johnson about his recent accolades, his writing process, and the fate of his Howie.

Alaya Dawn Johnson: First, congratulations on winning the World Fantasy Award for best novel. I think it was very well deserved. The Howie is a very dignified — and hefty — award statuette (in fact, from the back of the room, he looked like an Easter Island sculpture). Is he in a place of honor or holding down shopping lists?

Guy Gavriel Kay: Easter Island’s a cute description, Alaya! It is a substantial object, a good weapon, in fact. Colonel Mustard in the Living Room with the Howie. And, for the moment, he is on the living room mantelpiece, at my two sons’ insistence because, ‘That’s where these things go!’ Who am I to argue?

ADJ: I have been a huge Dorothy Dunnett fan for years, and when I discovered that you had not only known her but been very influenced by her Lymond Chronicles it was like a bolt of lightning in my brain. I discovered that there’s this fascinating genealogy of many writers I love that goes back to Dunnett’s masterwork and it makes a great deal of sense. Why do you think those books, though they’re not at all in the fantasy genre, have had such an impact on certain kind of fantasy novel — particularly writers like you and Ellen Kushner.

GGK: Dorothy was unmatched at the revelation of character through action, as opposed to stopping a narrative to ‘do’ the character-stuff, which so many writers (and that includes the serious ones) end up doing. She was also a role model in terms of the value, the necessity of doing your homework, your research. She exemplified as a writer the notion that entertaining stories are not remotely inconsistent with complex thought and character. All of these elements in her work (and more) will be noted by a wide variety of writers, and that extends far beyond and outside fantasy.

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There’s a discernible new voice in Young Adult Fiction. That voice is distinctly Nigerian…and American. Dr. Nnedi Okorafor thrives in a realm of fiction called African Fantasy.

This genre combines elements of speculative fiction, magical realism and traditional fantasy with a decidedly cultural twist. Not all of these books are set in Africa, but do contain aspects of African folklore. Also, instead of the traditional Celtic setting, stories have a more earthy approach to magic.

Nnedi was born in the United States to Igbo (Nigerian) immigrant parents and you can see that influence in her work. But, her path to writing was an unusual one. Absent are any anecdotes about knowing she wanted to write since she was a small child, though she was always an avid reader. Favoring the maths and sciences, she envisioned a career in either entomology or veterinary medicine.

All this changed when following her freshman year at college, she made the difficult decision to undergo surgery to correct scoliosis, a condition involving curvature of the spine. Nnedi found herself among the one percent of people paralyzed after the surgery.

Nnedi credits that experience and having to learn to walk again with releasing her creative juices. Undeterred by advice not to pursue her passion, she changed majors. She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Rhetoric (Creative Writing) and earned a PhD in English in 2007. The rest, shall we say is history.

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It seems like a common trope that diversity and quality in speculative fiction are mutually exclusive. Or, at least not a double necessity. Whenever an internet discussion blows up over this issue (notably, the Eclipse 2 anthology and Helix Magazine debates just this past year), I see it frequently stated that quality is more important than diversity, to the point where you would think quality and diversity couldn’t live in the same story. And nobody ever questions this.

This feels like an intentional non sequitur. Quality isn’t something that you can judge universally; it’s highly subjective. One person’s gold is another person’s fool’s gold. But more to the point, quality as a criterion really has nothing to do with the health of the speculative fiction field. “Quality” may give us a little more prestige with the literary folks, but it doesn’t stretch the boundaries of what we consider “speculative fiction”. It doesn’t get us thinking new ideas, seeing new horizons. Diversity does.

Two fairly recent anthologies: Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2005), edited by Sheree R. Thomas, and Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain (2003), edited by Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán, showcase African-American and (mostly) Spanish-speaking spec-fic writers respectively. Both, as Silvia Moreno-Garcia remarked to me a few months ago, have stories that are far more likely to appear in literary publications than any spec-fic market. Now there’s an irony for you–quality according to literary terms is used as an excuse for not aggressively pursuing diversity in spec-fic, yet all the ethnically diverse spec-fic is in the Literary section of the bookstore.

This brings us to the central irony of downgrading the importance of diversity in speculative fiction. The term is “speculative fiction”. It’s not just about shiny, phallic rocket ships populated by deep-in-the-closet Aryan brethren conquering the Final Frontier, people. It’s about different futures, alternate realities, dangerous fantasies. You’d think such places, where dragons dwell, would be heavily populated with equally unusual people, but nope. Looks like everybody important there is white, male, anglophone and straight. Not to mention perfectly healthy physically and mentally.

Excuse me, but how is that “speculative”?

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