Carolyn Ives Gilman is joining us today to talk about her novel, Testament of Leaves. Here’s the publisher’s description:
In the isolated thickets of a faraway planet, a linguist lies dead. Inscrutinator Shameesh Kulkarni must find out why. But no one wants to talk: not the prospectors searching for mineral wealth, not the archaeologists trying to piece together a ruined city, not the local schoolteacher, and certainly not the indigenous people whose language the dead woman was researching.
Only two beings are interested in helping Shameesh solve the murder: a digital replica of the victim herself, and the inquisitive octopod who befriended her. Three brains are better than one, even if one is a bot and another is an invertebrate, because there is more than one mystery here to solve.
Here, the landscape itself hides layers of centuries-old secrets-secrets that the inhabitants must protect at all costs. Shameesh’s job is to reveal the truth-on a planet where the truth cannot be spoken.
What’s Carolyn’s favorite bit?
I have always wanted to go scuba diving off the Great Barrier Reef. I want to see mounds of neon coral and striped clownfish and purple urchins. I want to float among the cuttlefish and kelp. It seems as close as I could get to being on another planet.
This fantasy is probably never going to happen. For one thing, I don’t know how to scuba dive. I’ve never even snorkeled. All those amazing aquatic environments I gaze at on YouTube are many thousands of miles and thousands of dollars away from my city condo in Washington, DC. Unless I win a spare life in the lottery, I’ll run out of time before I can take up a new career as a marine biologist.
But there’s always science fiction.
I mean, isn’t that what science fiction is for—to let us experience things we are never going to have a chance to do in real life? I’m never going to surf the rings of Saturn or take a submersible into the oceans of Europa, either, but I can do those things in science fiction. So why not live vicariously on a coral reef? So that’s what I set out to do in my most recent novella, Testament of Leaves.
Science fiction can also solve the most inconvenient thing about those mesmerizing ocean environments—the fact that human beings did not evolve to live under water. So rather than transplant humans into the ocean, I decided to transplant the ocean onto land. On the planet Hant, where my story takes place, there are ecosystems where tubeworms and jellyfish and sponges—or mysteriously engineered versions of them—thrive on land, and native populations of humans coexist with them. How this all came about is one of many puzzles I challenge my main character to solve. He is considerably less charmed by the setting than I am.
While I was writing this story, I was so enthusiastic about the planet Hant that I would dominate dinner-table conversations by describing it to people. I remember one puzzled relative saying, “But how do you make a story about all this?” I answered, “Oh, the story’s not about it. It’s about language, and conquest, and cultural memory. But it’s really a murder mystery.” Their eyes glazed over. “Oooo-kay…”
People who don’t read or write science fiction don’t know how many ingredients it takes to make a good SF story, or how much research and passion goes into the tiniest background details. Setting is much more of a character in SF than in other sorts of fiction. Of course, in the end it’s only one line in the recipe. But in this story, the worldbuilding is like the Worcestershire sauce in the stew—it flavors everything. It even gave me a chance to use all that aimless research I’d done on octopus cognition and behavior.
To find out how, I guess you just have to dive into the story.
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BIO:
Carolyn Ives Gilman is a Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Award-nominated author of science fiction and fantasy. Her books include Dark Orbit, Isles of the Forsaken, Ison of the Isles, and Halfway Human. Her short fiction has appeared in Analog, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, and others. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages and appeared in numerous Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies. Gilman lives in Washington, D.C., and works as a freelance writer and museum consultant. She is also author of seven nonfiction books about North American frontier and Native history.
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