Riding On a Toy Train:

  A Conversation with Aimee Ogden

  Arley Sorg

  You might call yourself a science fiction enthusiast, but Aimee Ogden has the ink to prove it: she has a tattoo of a quote from Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea on the inside of her forearm.

  Aimee Ogden was born and grew up in Michigan, “in the big smear of suburbs north of Detroit.” She earned a BS in zoology from Michigan State University, and later, she left a PhD program in cell biology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I realized that being good at college classes did not actually mean I was well suited to academia (nor to killing a lot of mice).” She stayed in Wisconsin, earned a teaching certificate, and worked as a science teacher in rural parts of the state. She lived in Wisconsin for about seventeen years, leaving the workforce after her twins were born. She went back to work briefly as a trainer at the YMCA, but the COVID pandemic ended that gig pretty quickly. “I also don’t talk about this much publicly, but I get muscle tension headache/upper body pain on a fairly regular basis that makes me fairly useless for one to three days at a go, which I think will be tough for my chances at any of the jobs I’m qualified for again at this stage in my life. In times gone by, I’ve also been a software tester, a laboratory assistant, and as previously mentioned, a high school science teacher.”

  Ogden snuck out of the state to attend Viable Paradise in 2018. More recently, she moved to the Netherlands. “We live a little outside the Randstad; we moved here for my spouse’s work and also because it’s a great opportunity for the kids to learn a new language as well as to live in a culture that I find a lot more encouraging of children as independent beings, who are welcome in public spaces, et cetera.” Ogden still occasionally volunteers, doing things when she’s in the US like voter registration or poll work; and she hopes to become involved in schools or libraries in the Netherlands. “In the second half of my life so far, I’ve turned out to be kind of a jock, or at least I’ve multi-classed into some kind of nerd-jock. I like weightlifting, and I’ve started playing ultimate frisbee here in the Netherlands again (I used to play before the kids were born).”

  Aimee Ogden started strong with poem “Morning Sickness” published in Asimov’s in 2014. This was followed by two short fiction publications in 2015: “The Light of the Moon, the Strength of the Storm, the Warmth of the Sun” in anthology Frozen Fairy Tales and “Au Ciel Monte” in The Sockdolager. But this was just the beginning; Ogden followed these up with a slew of fiction sales at a range of markets, including “Tomorrow’s World” in Daily Science Fiction in 2016, “The Cold, Lonely Waters” in Shimmer and “Elena’s Angel” in Apex in 2017, and many, many more. By the time “Intentionalities” came out in the January 2021 Clarkesworld, Ogden had over fifty original short story publications.

  To-date Ogden’s bibliography includes three novelettes and two novellas. Her foray into publishing longer word counts began with 2019’s “Blood, Bone, Seed, Spark” in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Tordotcom novella Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters came out in 2021 and was an SFWA Nebula Award finalist. Published that same year in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Ogden’s short story “A Flower Cannot Love the Hand” was a Eugie Foster Memorial Award finalist, and “The Cold Calculations” from the December 2021 Clarkesworld was selected for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022, edited by John Joseph Adams and Rebecca Roanhorse (Mariner).

  Aimee Ogden’s second novella from Tordotcom publishing is due later this month: Emergent Properties, “the touching adventure of an intrepid AI reporter hot on the heels of brewing corporate warfare.”

  Did you have any interesting experiences with genre when you were younger?

  Even though I majored in science, I also got to participate extracurricularly in the MSU chapter of the Genre Evolution Project (mainly run by a team out of the University of Michigan), which studied trends in SFF short fiction. I’d read a very little bit of short fiction before that—a Neil Gaiman collection and a little bit of Bradbury, basically—but that was where I first took a serious interest in the form. With the GEP, I first read Connie Willis, Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. Le Guin. (As well as plenty of other, somewhat less memorable work from decades of pulp magazines. There was a really charming story whose title I can’t remember about a grandmother who ends up becoming the leader of the space pirates who try to board the interstellar transport she was a passenger on.) We read Ted Chiang’s “Tower of Babylon” together as a group, and I reread the printout three times in the week after that meeting. That story in particular blew my mind with what short fiction could do, could say.

  You have a massive list of published short fiction, going back to 2015. What is the key to consistently selling work to short fiction markets?

  To be completely realistic, clear, and honest, the single biggest reason I’m able to do what I do is that I’m very privileged to have an amazing partner that provides most of our family’s financial support. Before I left the full-time workforce, I was too exhausted to write more than a few words now and then.

  The other part of the equation is that I’m incredibly stubborn. I think my first sale to Clarkesworld came on my sixty-third submission here.

  Has your writing changed in important ways since those first few publications? And if so, to what do you attribute those changes?

  These days, I’m more comfortable writing in a voice that feels like my own. That’s there in some of my old work too, but I think there was also a tendency to hew toward some vague notion of “what a short story sounds like.” Being a small part of the vast and varied modern short fiction landscape, seeing all the wonderful things that other writers are doing and experimenting with—it would be hard not to look around at that and see that there are infinite ways for what a short story can sound like, look like, accomplish.

  If readers were to look at one or two of your short stories, what would you want them to read, and why?

  One of my all-time favorites is and probably always will be “Seb Dreams of Reincarnation,” which came out in Escape Pod in 2017. The stakes are small—just one guy and his mental health, his feelings of loss and isolation—but I loved how Seb unfolded for me on the page, and I hope readers love him too.

  The other one I’d choose is “Intentionalities,” from Clarkesworld in 2021, which packs in a lot of thoughts about complicity in a controlling, horrible system, and also to some extent about the choice to have children in a world that looks like this. When I first outlined it, I thought that the story was going to be flash, but as soon as I started writing, I could see it wasn’t enough to show how it started and where it ended up; the story had to show all those shuffling steps closer to inevitability.

  You are also coeditor at Translunar Travelers Lounge. What does the magazine do, what sets it apart?

  We’re a semiprofessional speculative fiction magazine that publishes stories of a humorous, fun, or optimistic bent. Of course, the umbrella of what we find “fun and optimistic” has room underneath it for, among others, a 1950s Hollywood B-movie starlet defeating an alien invasion, choke point capitalists accidentally self-sabotaging by releasing a strain of plastic-eating bacteria into the world, and eating your abuser.

  Has editing had an impact on your writing in any specific or important ways? Does being a writer give you a different perspective as an editor?

  I wish I could say that editing has had more of an impact on my writing, but editing my own fiction will, I suspect, forever be an area of weakness—the same things that stand out to me in someone else’s work generally fly clear under my radar when I’m rereading my own. Thank goodness for critique partners.

  As a writer who has had less-than-stellar experiences in the past with an editor who tried to broadly rewrite my story into something more like what they would have written in my place, that’s something I always strive to avoid. Going back to my earlier comments about voice, my job is to help highlight the shape the author has already created, and to help find a way to make the story sound, if possible, even more like their own voice than it did when it first crossed my desk. I’ve said “help” twice in a row because that’s really all my side of things is. My red pen keeps its cap on most of the time.

  Most of your work has been short fiction, but you’ve also published significant pieces at novelette and novella length. Is your approach to writing fiction different depending on the length?

  I outline everything I write, from flash to novel length, but those outlines become exponentially beefier at longer lengths. A flash outline might be three sentences; my current novel outline consists of five pages and a spreadsheet. Because I still like to discover things as I write—and because I find the scope of an entire novella or novel much harder to hold in my head all at once than a piece of flash or a short story—that means I usually end up re-outlining at least once partway through the drafting of a longer work.

  On a purely mechanical level, I also use Scrivener to write anything longer than ten thousand words or so, instead of Microsoft Word, because in the long-ago times before Scrivener, I—more than once—accidentally deleted an entire scene while trying to copy-paste shuffle it around. Never again.

  Looking at your body of work, are there themes that usually come through, motifs you gravitate toward, or other elements that show up in a lot of your pieces?

  Family relationships, especially mothers and daughters, pop up over and over again. Parents who don’t understand their children; parents that desperately want to, parents that don’t. Siblings that fight, reconcile, fly away from each other never to speak again. People falling in love and people falling out of love and people who really should have told each other that they were doing one of those things.

  Emergent Properties is your third novella, and your second with Tordotcom. What did you learn from publishing the first two that you brought to this one?

  Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters has at least one big thing in common with Emergent Properties—embarking on a potentially difficult, dangerous voyage away from your planet of origin—but in most ways, Local Star is more of a direct precursor. That’s the book that helped me figure out how to play out the occasional more action-oriented scene, and also how to unravel a mystery for my own benefit before sewing it closed again for the characters and the readers to puzzle out.

  Emergent Properties takes on the story of Scorn, an AI who moves into different kinds of corporeal and digital spaces. What were the biggest challenges in telling an AI story, and how did you rise to those challenges?

  The first part, of course, was shoving all the things that get badly mislabeled with the title of “artificial intelligence” all the way out of my head. Large language models have nothing to do with intelligence, and indeed the ways they’re being deployed so far look, to me, pretty goddamned stupid. Firing the staff of an eating disorder hotline and replacing it with a chatbot that recommends developing an eating disorder? Using what’s basically a predictive text generator to invent legal precedents from thin air? I don’t think we’ve reached the level of unleashing the Torment Nexus, but we sure have built the Turning Google Searches into a Useless Sludge of Gray Goo Misinformation Nexus.

  Anyway. I’m not sure that I believe that true artificial intelligence is even possible; but the next challenge, and honestly a fun part of the process, was dreaming up some of what would go into its development if it were. I remember going down a research rabbit hole after hearing an episode of the Many Minds podcast on artificial intelligence and the speculated role of embodiment in human cognition. So all of my AIs are embodied—some physically, some virtually—because of that.

  What was the initial inspiration for Emergent Properties, and how did the book develop or change throughout the editing process?

  The initial inspiration was, essentially, “huh, wouldn’t it be cool to write a murder mystery that gets investigated by the murder victim themself?” The murder victim then had to either be something fantastical, like a ghost, or an artificial intelligence with a backup saved off in the cloud somewhere. The rest of the plot evolved out from that, with my typical method of worldbuilding going on in the background. Have you ever seen the episode of Wallace and Gromit where Gromit, the dog, is riding on the front of a toy train engine and laying out the tracks ahead of him as the train goes? That’s how I do worldbuilding, insofar as that can be called “worldbuilding,” or indeed “doing.” What do I need to make this world feel lived in until the end of the scene? Throw that down in front of the train and just keep on going.

  The biggest change during the writing process had to do with some of the role of the “who” in the “whodunnit.” Toward the end of the first draft, some of the moving pieces started clicking together in ways I hadn’t foreseen when outlining, and I had to re-outline the last few scenes (and go back and rewrite some of the setup) in order to close everything off in a way that felt satisfying to me. Huge thanks to my editor, Christie Yant, for helping so much to purge everything that had become red herrings or empty leads in the rewrite, all of which had become invisible to me by that point in the writing process.

  What are some of your favorite things about this book?

  I love Scorn, and I love xir absolute disinterest in what “being human” entails. I love hijinks on the Moon. I love text message conversations between technologists with literal Divorced Mom Energy and their extremely-done-with-all-of-this AI child-slash-creation. Also, I love cramming the word Translunar unsubtly into the story as part of a corporation name.

  What is the heart of Emergent Properties for you, what do you want readers to know about this book?

  This book is for those—AIs or otherwise—who found that they’d turned out to be something other than what their parents expected, and maybe also something other than what their parents wanted. By which I mean, this book is for me, and anyone else who wants to come along for the ride.

  What else are you working on, what do you have coming up that you’d like to share with us?

  A few years ago, I wrote a young adult novel that is very dear to my heart, which never escaped the query trenches; now I’m try to re-wrangle it into an adult novella with a different POV character, a reduction of scope, and some smaller, more personal stakes. I also have yet another novella in the July/August of F&SF, this one a secondary-world fantasy about a woman living in a city on the back of a giant crab god, in the crab god’s final days.

  About the Author

  Arley Sorg is an associate agent at kt literary. He is a two-time World Fantasy Award Finalist and a two-time Locus Award Finalist for his work as co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. Arley is also a SFWA Solstice Award Recipient, a Space Cowboy Award Recipient, and a finalist for two Ignyte Awards. Arley is senior editor at Locus, associate editor at both Lightspeed & Nightmare, a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and an interviewer for Clarkesworld. He is a guest critiquer for the 2023 Odyssey Workshop, and is the week five instructor for the 2023 6-week Clarion West Workshop, among other teaching and speaking engagements.

  Editor’s Desk:

  Things Only Sort of Change

  Neil Clarke

  Seventeen years ago this month, Clarkesworld began as a late-night idea at Readercon in Burlington, MA. It was an idea fueled by optimism, foolishness, experience, and inexperience. The worst that happened would be that no one would care, the stories would go unread, and we’d have wasted our time. Fortunately, there were authors and artists willing to take that leap with Sean, Nick, and I. Everyone from that first year has a special place in the history of the magazine and my heart.

  I both miss and don’t miss those days. We were the rebels playing in the uncool digital world when print dominated the field, paper submissions were the norm, people said short fiction was in danger, and everyone was concerned about their work being pirated by people the government doesn’t do enough about. Today, online magazines have the largest overall readerships in the field, digital submissions are the standard, people still say short fiction is in danger, and everyone is concerned about their work being slurped up, digested, and regurgitated by a generative AI that the government doesn’t do enough about.

  Seriously though . . . a lot has changed, even if some seems to have barely changed at all. We’re still chasing a dream, thinking on our feet, and looking for answers. The ticking doomsday clock for Clarkesworld has never been comfortably far away from us. Such is the unfortunate nature of working in short fiction.

  And that’s a good segue for my monthly public service announcement:

  A very significant portion of Clarkesworld’s subscriber base is currently handled by Amazon subscriptions, but that program is coming to an end this September, taking with it a healthy chunk of our income. If you are presently a Clarkesworld subscriber on the Kindle, please see this post: clarkesworldmagazine.com/amazon-subscribers/ to discover your post-Amazon options. We hope you’ll consider sticking with us.

  When we first discovered that Amazon was abandoning its digital subscription service, we calculated the number of new and transferred subscriptions it would take to keep the lights on in 2024. In June, we crossed the halfway mark and are very grateful to those who have already signed up. I know it must be tiring to hear us go on about this, but the only way to address this problem is head-on. We’re counting on our readers and that requires various reminders and announcements for a few more months.

 

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