Interviewing Wole Talabi

Hellooo!!

I recently review the excellent short fiction collection Convergence Problems by Wole Talabi that takes us from disasters on mars and in space to sinister job interviews, troubling inventions and tales of Gods. It was a pleasure to welcome Wole back to the blog to discuss this excellent book and the wider writing behind it.

How do you like to booktempt Convergence problems?

Convergence Problems is a collection of stories that investigate the rapidly changing role of technology and belief in our lives as we search for meaning, for knowledge, for justice; constantly converging on our future selves. Featuring everything from a novella to flash fiction, and covering topics like AI, space exploration, climate change, neuroscience and more, I think it will appeal to anyone who enjoys philosophical science fiction and fantasy stories told in unexpected ways, that explore different aspects of our humanity from an African perspective. The collection has received two (!) starred reviews from Booklist and Publisher’s Weekly who called it a “modern classic”. Tempting enough?

Your stories often mix myth and folktales with a SF focused approach. What is the continuing power for these tales that make you revisit them?

I have always found myths fascinating and complex, and I try to incorporate as much of them as I can in my work right beside any scientific and technological development I envision. I like to map out and play with the overlaps and parallels between myth and science fiction. Myths are some of our most enduring stories. They are the stories we tell and retell ourselves about ourselves and our place in the world, sometimes in reference to things and events in the world that are larger than us. That often means they say something important about the human condition. And I like to use them as frameworks for thinking about the future. This is partly because I grew up in Nigeria where often the physical and spiritual are presented side by side seamlessly with no separation but also because, I also acknowledge the vastness of what is not yet known in the universe and all the different ways in which people have filled those gaps. It is in the spaces between our knowledge or in the ambiguity of our perceptions that I try to fit the mythical and spiritual elements of my stories. Humans have had magical and spiritual beliefs since we formed societies and I believe we will continue to do so, because there will always be a gap between the known and the unknown and that’s where myths and legends sit. They help us make meaning. Therefore, the blending of both seems natural to me, even when speculating about the future.

As an engineer and an author does that discipline you in using SF ideas and does this create any tensions in how a story develops?

In a way yes, because I am always aware of what a plausible scientific and technological concept should look like on the page. At the same time, I also know just how messy and unclear a lot of science and technology can be, so I don’t get too stuck on trying to make details of technologies plausible – I’m not trying to invent new things with every idea. I just need to create the semblance of plausibility to drive the story where it needs to go conceptually and emotionally. Both writing and engineering require a keen sense of observation, attention to detail and a curiosity about the world, so my author and engineering brain have learned how to be the same brain and that means there is no tension. I usually am thinking about both the technical and emotional elements of a story at the same time and how they need to dovetail into each other.

In this collection we get stories in web links, patent envelopes and even in song. What do you enjoy about these challenges?

I always enjoy experimenting with form even if it’s difficult, if it takes me time to get there, even if it doesn’t always work. The journey is fun. I like twisting my brain around into different positions to see things from different angles. It’s one of the most enjoyable aspects of writing for me – finding unexpected ways to tell a story effectively.

Which story was the hardest to write?

Probably “Comments On Your Provisional Patent Application For an Eternal Spirit Core” which was first published in Clarkesworld. I’d decided that I wanted to write a story in the form of a patent application document, and I was determined to make it work. But patent application documents aren’t meant to be entertaining so finding a balance between making the document appear to be a realistic enough patent memo for this imaginary technology while allowing the story the play out in comments was hard and took several tries to get right. I am eternally grateful to the late, great Nick Wood who gave me the feedback I needed after a few iterations to make it work.

What for you is the best thing about writing short fiction?

For me, stories are like thought experiments, little ways of exploring something interesting about the world. And I think thought experiments work best when they are concise and illuminating. This means that a lot of my stories work best in the short form. Enough time to introduce and explore an idea but not scaffold too many things around it because its load-bearing capacity might not be sufficient. But some ideas can bear more weight – theme, plot, characters, points of view – and it needs them to truly be explored properly. Those are the stories I linger with and write in longer form - the novellas and the novels. But with short fiction, I can quickly work through a concept, or an idea and learn something new in the process. I absolutely love that.

It has been five years since your last collection Incomplete Solutions have you noticed any differences in how you approach short fiction now?

Yes. There are. I am much more deliberate about how I want stories to end now. I used to just start writing and then get stuck and try to figure out an ending a lot more. Now I tend to think more and have some idea where I am going before I start writing.

And I have become much more interested in traditional African philosophy, science and technology than was five years ago.

Who are some of your favourite short fiction writers?

Well, how much time do you have? Haha! There are far too many short fiction authors whose work I love that I can’t really make a list that doesn’t feel incorrect or incomplete.  So, I’ll limit this to living authors and you should consider it a random sampling, rather than the actual full list:

Carmen Maria Machado. Nnedi Okorafor. Derek Künsken, Neil Gaiman. Tobias S. Buckell. Ted Chiang. Sofia Samatar. Stephen King. Tade Thompson. Ken Liu. Jeffrey Archer. Steven Barnes.

And so many, many more.

What else can we look forward to from you in the future?

Right now, I’m working on my second novel – a science fiction novel which is simultaneously a near-future thriller and a meditation on the nature of memory, legacy, and connectedness featuring assassins, aliens, AI, ancestral memory, and a lot more. No details yet, but I’m excited to finish this story I’ve been mulling over for years. Coming soon!

I just finished writing a new science fiction novella set in the Sauútiverse – the first African SFF shared world. It’s a planetary exploration story called “Descent”. There are also many stories set in the Sauútiverse being written by other members of the collective as well as contributors from all over the African continent and diaspora, and I am excited to see them out in the world too.

I also have a few more short stories that should be making their way out into the world soon in a few anthologies and magazines (including one in Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art, and another from Subterranean Press later this year), so I’m excited about those. I hope readers enjoy and connect with these stories.

What great books have you read recently?

I absolutely loved Pemi Aguda’s debut collection Ghostroots which is just a perfectly constructed, deeply human, breathtakingly beautiful, and numinous book.

I also recently enjoyed Tlotlo Tsamaase’s raw, lyrical and incandescent Africanfuturist tale, Womb City, Eliane Boey’s beautiful and tense novella diptych Other Minds, and Tobi Ogunidran’s excellent fantasy novella In the Shadow of the Fall.