I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!
Today we are joined by human-shaped, monkey-loving, robot-fighting, pirate- hearted, storytelling junkie, Mark Rayner is an award- winning author of satire and speculative fiction. He writes in the genres of science fiction, humorous SF and dark comedy. He also dips his toe in the occasional bit of dramatic prose and experimental/literary fiction. When not working on the next novel, he pens short stories, squibs and other drivel. (Some pure, and some quite tainted with meaning.) He's the co-host of Re-Creative, a podcast about how creative people were inspired by other works of art. Mark does all these things while being Canadian and owning cats.
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What’s the single best line you’ve ever read?
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that
bricks don't.”
~Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
What is your favorite book from childhood?
One of my first
memories is of reading my favorite book, Look Out
for Pirates! aloud, to my brother, Mike. He was barely a toddler.
Whenever I leaned over the crib to show him the picture that went with the
prose I was so enthusiastically reciting, he’d grab the book at try to throw it
away. (Very pirate-like behavior, so I approved.)
A few years
later, when all my classmates were explaining they wanted to be astronauts, or
nurses, or firefighters, I explained it was the pirates life for me. I was
devasted when I learned that being a pirate was not a viable career goal. (I
mean, unless you want to manage a hedge fund.)
If you could
have a superpower, what would it be?
Telekinesis,
100%!
It gets you
flying, assuming you can lift yourself. You don’t have superstrength, but you
don’t need to get close to anything. You can protect yourself with force
fields. Hell, you could theoretically manipulate atoms and create things with
the power of your mind.
Plus, you never
have to get off the couch when you can’t find the remote!
Am I jazzed
about this superpower? Hell yeah. I’m in the process of writing two trilogies
in which this is the killer app.
Summarize your
book using only gifs or emojis.
https://media1.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExczVwYnZ3eDA4djZzM3dm
What’s the one
book someone else wrote that you wish you had written?
Serious answer
for this one: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. It’s about Marco Polo
telling Kublai Khan about all the marvelous cities in the Khan’s empire, but so
much more. It’s a prose poem, a paean to the limitless nature of human
creativity. Don’t look to it for plot or character development, but in terms of
style and imagination it’s not to be missed. And it inspired one of the short
stories in my new collection, The Gates of Polished Horn, “This
Ambiguous Miracle.”
What are some
of your favorite books and/or authors?
Some of my
favourite authors include Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, William
Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, Chuck Palahniuk, Tom Robbins, George Orwell,
Robertson Davies, Julian Barnes, George Saunders, Milan Kundera, William
Gibson, Douglas Adams, Christopher Moore, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard &
Italo Calvino.
If you could
spend the day with another author, who would you choose and why?
Assuming we can
go back in time? Kurt Vonnegut. He’s my literary hero, and I consider one of
America’s all-time great satirists. Vonnegut has a beautiful way of casting the
folly of human nature into disrepute at the same time as having great sympathy,
and even love, for his characters. Plus, he was funny as hell and apparently a
great conversationalist when he was in the mood.
Which literary
invention do you wish was real and why?
I guess I stole
my own thunder on this one – a time machine, clearly. Though you have to be
careful when you’re time travelling, as people will learn from the first story
in my new collection, “Socratic Insanity.” The framework for this story is that
time travellers who go back to, oh, let’s say kill Hitler before he does all
his damage, believe they have succeeded. But when they come back, they have not
– you can’t change what has already happened, or if you do, you create an
alternate reality. But you can’t travel to an alternate reality. Their
subjective reality – I killed Hitler – just doesn’t match the objective
reality. So my time travellers go insane. But not if they’re careful and don’t
try to change anything. Having drinks with Kurt Vonnegut doesn’t count.
What do you do
when you’re not writing?
I teach at
Western University, at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS). I’m
very lucky to have a job that feeds my writing, while much of my marketing activities
as a writer help me in the classroom. My teaching focuses on web design,
information architecture, visual communication and social media. I teach in the
undergrad program, called Media and Communication, plus in our two professional
graduate programs, the Library and Information Science program, and in the
Master of Media in Journalism and Communication program.
When I’m not
teaching, I like to enjoy workouts, reading, video games, movies and playing
guitar. And my two cats, Max and Milo, keep me busy too!
Why do you
write?
For the money,
of course. Bwahahah!
Sorry. It’s
just that this is a deep and difficult question. Why am I trying to answer it?
I guess I like a challenge. I mean, writing is one of the all-time great
artistic challenges. The rejection isn’t as intense as it is with acting, but
it’s up there. Yet having the ability to bring people, ideas, worlds … whole
universes into existence is just such a cool thing.
Writing is an
act of empathy. The best stories are ones that move us and that requires the
author has compassion for their characters. Even the baddies.
And I’ve always
been a storyteller, since I first started reading Look Out for Pirates!
to my brother. It’s a compulsion. An intellectually and emotionally rewarding
compulsion. It can be painful too, but I’ve never really seriously considered
NOT writing. It’s too much at the core of who I am.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We discover the cruelty of creating synthetic consciousness. A woman is worried that her husband is having an affair but discovers it's much, much worse. A time traveler uncovers a reality-bending fact while observing the death of Socrates. Waldo, of Where's Waldo fame, has an existential crisis. A traveling salesperson is killed on the highway, and this is just the start of his journey through the gates.
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