Conversation with Christine Lucas

Christine Lucas is a Greek author, a retired Air Force officer (disabled), and mostly self-taught in English. Her work appears in several print and online magazines, including Future SF Digest, Pseudopod, and Strange Horizons. She was a finalist for the 2017 WSFA award and the 2021 Emeka Walter Dinjos Memorial Award For Disability In Speculative Fiction. Her collection of short stories, Fates and Furies, was published in late 2019 by Candlemark & Gleam.

Christine is the author of “Dream Eater” from Radon Issue 7.

Q: What can readers expect when they check out your short story collection, Fates and Furies?

The stories in Fates and Furies combine elements of myth, fantasy, science fiction and magic realism, all centered around Greek legends and folklore, and of course the Aegean Sea. From Minoan Crete, through Alexander’s campaign and modern-day Greek countryside to the wilds of Mars, I set out to explore how the ancient can mingle with the modern and the futuristic. As my publisher Athena Andreadis wrote, the stories in the collection explore the question, “how do we live well?” And, moreover, when the time comes, “how can we die well?”

It received a glowing review from Kelly Jennings at Strange Horizons that summed up everything I could ever write about it in a most eloquent way.

Q: What daily sacrifices of poetry and prose did you give as a child as you learned English?

Growing up as an ADHD kid in the 80s in Greece, the only writing I’d ever sit down to do was school-related essays. My language teacher, a published author herself, always believed I’d one day write (and if only I had listened earlier). But according to my family, writers and artists can’t earn a living, so off to the military I was shipped. Yet I clearly remember that when I finished high school there was this profound sadness within me that I’d never get to write again.

Although I didn’t write much during my childhood and teen years, the stories were still there. I would play them out with my action figures, when I sent them back-packing through jungles, exploring strange planets or the bottom of the oceans.

It wasn’t until my early thirties, during a summer of too much heat and too much beer on a Greek island camping, when I came across a paperback in a tiny local bookstore. A Conan paperback, of all things. Perhaps it was the heat, perhaps the beer, but all those old stories resurfaced and I thought to myself, “Hey, I can do this!”

Turns out that I couldn’t.

At least not until later, after I’d refined my rusted English language skills, that I’ve landed my first publication of a short story with the title “Nine Lives.” And now that I’ve leveled-up my language skills, I can do with words what I did with my action figures back then.

Q: How often do cats enter into your speculative fiction?

Too often. There’s a running joke in my local in-person workshop that they can guess which story is mine by the presence of a cat in it. It might be a cameo, a full-fledged feline character, or another animal that behaves suspiciously like a cat. (It’s my long-standing belief that octopuses are the cat equivalent of marine life—in temperament, at least).

And sometimes, they appear in other ways too: I remember one time, when I was going through the final proof edits for a story for a pro magazine, my then kitten Snow ran over the keyboard and added random numbers throughout the document. Using the “undo” command wouldn’t work for some reason, so I had to go through all 6K+ words to manually remove them. When I sent the manuscript back to the editors with my apologies for any random numbers that might still be in the document, they were very understanding and dubbed Kitten Snow as Kitten Editor.

Kitty Snow hasn’t moved much since, now that she’s all grown up.

Q: When you sit down to write historical fiction, fantasy, or science fiction, do you approach each style from a unique perspective or intent?

With historical fiction I try to pay close attention to the specifics of that time. I mostly write in ancient Egypt and Minoan Crete which gives me some leeway to incorporate more modern concepts, since there are gaps in what we know about those times.

What changes in each approach is mostly the language. With historical/fantasy fiction I can usually be more flowery, but with science fiction I try to use more standard language. But I’m known to break both of these “rules” from time to time. The story will be what the story wants to be.

Q: What were people’s reactions when you told them you aspired to be a writer?

As I’ve mentioned earlier, my family’s viewpoint was: “Artists and writers in Greece can’t earn a living. An army career does earn a living. So off you go.” While neither of these statements are false, it was never my choice. Especially as a minor in pre-internet times.

I didn’t tell anyone in real life until after I had a few publications under my belt around 2010. Now people actively ask me about my published works and I’m blessed with siblings who actually read things I write, and fellow authors I can call friends.

An interesting tidbit, related to my writing about cats: some of the early critiques about my writing mentioned that “stories about cats don’t sell.” Then, imagine if you will my surprise when I received an email from non-other than Ellen Datlow in August 2009 requesting my short story “Dominion” about the origins of cats to be reprinted in her anthology Tails of Wonder and Imagination. So the nobody that I was ended up sharing ToC with Stephen King, G.R.R. Martin and Neil Gaiman, among others.

So there.

Q: If the Promised Land existed in your story’s world, what do you imagine it would be?

“My God, it’s full of cats!”

Seriously now, I think of it as Earth after the Ice Age. Still unspoiled by humans, with a variety of habitats, and the occasional local fauna and flora intent on making the lives of human settlers challenging. Because life without challenges is a boring life.

Q: Do you wish you could view or eat others’ dreams in real life?

My younger self might have said “Absolutely!” My current self will say, “No thanks.” We all need our privacy and dignity to live a content life.

Q: What did you draw on to create the emotional and wrenching impetus for “Dream Eater”?

A current theme in my writing is having one’s agency torn from them, and how this person can overcome seemingly impossible odds to regain it. Always on their terms, always within their own limits.

And I always wanted to write a “brain-in-a-jar” story, so . . .

Q: Where do you hope to take your short fiction from here?

As I’ve completed half a century of life on this planet, I finally begin to understand and accept the parts of my identity that no one explained to me while I was growing up: queer/ace, disabled, neurodivergent. I want to explore all these in my fiction, but not in a bleak way. I want my stories to end with hope, with reassurance that, at least for now, the evil is slain and everything in the world is in its rightful place.

Until the next time.