Chatting with Ashlee Lhamon

Ashlee Lhamon has an impressive lunchbox collection and a tuxedo cat named Gumshoe. Her other work currently appears or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Cotton Xenomorph, MetaStellar, Salamander, Hunger Mountain and others. She’s not on social media, but has filled this gap with unsatisfying stalking opportunities at her website: ashleelhamon.com.

Ashlee is the author of “Tank Baby” from Radon Issue 7.

Q: “Tank Baby” starts with a haunting, classic sci-fi image: a baby floating in a tank. What about this image has made it so enduring for readers and writers?

This is such a great question! I think it’s enduring for two reasons: one, gestation is probably the one absolutely universal human experience—not even conception is, if you happen to be in one of the religions that believes in the immaculate kind. But the womb is still this strange biological fishbowl of chemicals and hormones that absolutely everyone has to cook in for a significant number of months before making a worldly debut. One of the main tenets of science fiction is about putting biological processes into human control, so it seems like a natural fit for the genre to often begin with the beginning.

At the same time, the central tension (and perhaps irony) of transhumanism and techno-anarchism is that once you bring technology into anything, you’re inviting tech companies (and therefore profit margins) to take a seat at the table. And once profit margins get a seat, they want to set the menu and the prices and dictate who else gets a plate. Neuralink might let you control a computer cursor with your mind, but that same open door potentially lets Coca-Cola beam ads straight into your brainspace.

So I think science fiction is also very concerned with the idea that if we turn over the most universal human experience to science and technology (and therefore capitalism), where does that take us? What does that make us?

(I know, I know, something something the promising future of utopian-techno-collectivism, but no one I know writing the utopian stuff really knows what an algorithm is much less how to create one, and I live in the Bay Area and can assure you that almost no one who does believes in collective anything. So, que sera sera.)

Q: In the world of the story, Claire doesn’t know why the “tank goo” is pink. Why did you as a writer decide on pink? Do you have a process for deciding on story details?

So I’ll say it’s partially inspired by Life magazine’s famous “Fetus 18 Weeks” cover, which is what I always think of when I think of wombspace, and because of blood vessels and camera lighting and all that: pink! But also, doesn’t pink just have like this gooey biologicalness to it? Undoubtedly in the universe of this story there’s going to be a Tank Baby marketing department that’s concerned with the most convincing womb goo color. Yellow would be too much like pee and blue would be too much like Windex. Real amniotic fluid is actually clear, but that’s probably too much like growing your baby in a fishbowl, and customers aren’t going to like that. Plus, if your customers don’t have enough fluid for one reason or another and it is clear, they’ll just assume it’s basically water and top off from the tap, and the goo people have a whole mess of lawsuits to deal with.

All that said, this is definitely not how I consciously come up with details of a story. I read somewhere once that both too few details and too many are the realm of an unconvincing liar, and if you want to lie like a pro, you have to find the goldilocks zone—don’t tell me the names of all flowers in a garden, and don’t just call them flowers, but if you say something like “the alstroemerias are in bloom,” even if I don’t know what an alstroemeria is or what it looks like blooming, the garden feels just a bit more real. The last decade or so of my writing career has been finding that sweet spot of a conman’s self-assured authority—you don’t need to know the shape of the baby tank or its relative construction, but if I tell you the goo’s pink, you believe in a little more, right?

Q: How did you conceive (pun intended) the first germ of the story? How did it grow and develop (pun intended) from there?

Oh god, I would love to go pun intended here, but I actually was four months pregnant when I started this story. I was reading (and living) some pregnancy horror when fellow Radon writer and friend Andrew Maust told me about how awesome y’all are and suggested I write a story to submit to you. We kicked some ideas back and forth and I ended up with pregnancy horror + chemical hot tub testing strips + thumb sucking being bad for dental hygiene (the latter two because my mind is a strange place), topped off by my husband accidentally getting a bolt stuck in the filter of our dishwasher, which rattled incessantly every time the wash cycle kicked on. Tada! Though Andrew was disappointed that it did not end up being a story about a Panzer covered with infant-based armor, as the title implies.

Q: What is your writing setup like?

I actually write at my kitchen table, which is why the rattling dishwasher has been a key source of inspiration. Always on a laptop with 17% battery left because I forget to charge it and then I forget where I put my charger, so writing is kind of a game of chicken between me and it. Always with a cup of black coffee that I sip on for about six or seven hours. I tell people I drink black coffee because I’m a badass, but really it’s because when I put creamer in flies start noodling around it after about three hours, and you only need to find one of those drowned suckers the hard way before you change your life.

Q: What themes and approaches do you think are going to become important in speculative fiction in the next few years? What concepts do you think we as readers need?

I feel like AI is the easy answer here, because we all think of art as the uniquely human scion. We don’t like to think of ourselves as computers made of meat, because if we’re just computers made of meat that means the computers made of precious metals can do what we do, only maybe faster and better because they’re more sensibly composed and made of rarer stuff. It’s probably also the right answer, but talking about AI makes me depressed, so let’s not.

To pivot, I think approaching writing or reading from the idea of “need” is a well-intentioned but wrongheaded impulse. It connects too closely in my mind with sermonizing. If the moral of a story could overtly or slyly direct the moral education of a people, then the sheer number of enthusiastically received new editions, reboots, and remakes of A Christmas Carol would have long ensured that every adult in America is an ardently practicing communist. Obviously, that hasn’t happened.

Maybe I’m alone in this, but all I want from other authors is for them to show me their ass. Not literally of course (no butt pics please), but the uncanny, awkward, funny, ugly, panicky corners of the human experience. The story that you tell when you’re a couple of tallboys in and the parking lot is dark and someone is smashing glass behind a dumpster. I don’t want perfect teeth. I don’t want autotune. I don’t want characters that have Morally Correct stamped across their faces like time travelers from Pilgrim’s Progress dressed up in modern clothes. I always want to feel a little bit embarrassed by a story, like the author is showing me pictures of their middle school self that they, too, would rather burn.

Q: A large unspoken theme in “Tank Baby” is the ambiguity and fear that takes root in relationships between the sexes (such as “For All Your Other Daughters” from Nightmare). What suggestions would you have for other writers looking to address these themes?

I think the main suggestion I would give is the old adage: there’s more than one way to skin a cat. “For All Your Other Daughters” is a pretty depressing story. (It’s inspired by the great Connie Willis’ “All My Darling Daughters,” so if you REALLY want to mess up your day, go read that.) “Tank Baby” on the other hand is intended to be pretty lighthearted and funny (is it funny? I hope it’s funny). One thing I’ve been internalizing is that serious themes do not necessarily require serious stories.

My impulse has definitely been to land on the side of the dramatic—they kind of beat that into in MFAs, where no one, as a rule, thinks you’re funny—but as a reader, I’m much more likely to curl up with Terry Pratchett after work than I am Cormac McCarthy (sorry Cor). Science fiction has a long and lovely history of goofiness and playfulness that I don’t see so much in short stories now. So that would be my suggestion: ask yourself, what if this were funny?

Q: If the technology was around today, how do you think “tank babies” would influence the way we see the act of having children?

So, going back to that first question, while gestation is a fundamental human experience, the possibility of gestating is limited to about 50% of the population, plus or minus some percentage points. This has saddled women with a lot of woo-woo “Earth Mother innate childrearing knowledge” expectations and assumptions, which, as I can assure you from my very recent experience, is bullshit. While a lot of guys on the Internet complain that sitcom dads are always morons, it’s also fundamentally unfair that mom is always designated the level-headed competent one, especially when it comes to babies and children. One of the things I liked best about writing “Tank Baby” was Claire and Stan both get to be idiots.

If growing babies in a tank became the great biological equalizer, I hope a lot of that “innate knowledge” baggage around pregnancy and childbirth would no longer be relevant. Totally normal experiences like not falling madly in love with your baby right away or having no idea what to do with this living bag of poop and spit would no longer require reassuring fliers and handouts about baby blues in maternity wards and OB offices. Hopefully, a lot of motherhood myths would die in favor of, “Of course you don’t know what you’re doing! You grew that baby in a tank!”

Q: Tell us about your experience with the Clarion workshop in 2018. What did you learn that you feel you will carry with you as long as you write?

Since this interview is probably now longer than my actual story, and since there is literally not enough space on the entire Internet for me to answer this question, I’ll just say it was one of the best and most enriching experiences of my life, and I literally just gave birth to my first child. Everyone reading this should apply. Trust me.

Q: How is your science fiction murder mystery novel progressing?

Unfortunately, having a one-month-old and so getting two hours of sleep every other day (an exaggeration, but just barely), writing as a whole has taken a backseat for a little while. Luckily, I’m getting tons of ideas thanks to this wiggly little human person in my life, so I’m looking forward to getting back to it soon. Hopefully. Once she’s asleep. She has to sleep sometime, right?