Phillip Scott Mandel On How To Write Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories

An Interview With Ian Benke

Playfulness. Don’t always take yourself or your work too seriously, and don’t be afraid to have some humor in there to dispel some of the tension. This doesn’t mean don’t be serious about writing, or your career, by the way, it just means that you (and your reader) can have some fun. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is a great example of this, but I would also recommend the stories of Karen Russell and Kelly Link.

Science Fiction and Fantasy are hugely popular genres. What does it take for a writer today, to write compelling and successful Science Fiction and Fantasy stories? Authority Magazine started a new series called “How To Write Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories”. In this series we are talking to anyone who is a Science Fiction or Fantasy author, or an authority or expert on how to write compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy.

As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Phillip Scott Mandel.

Phillip Scott Mandel is the founder and editor in chief of Abandon Journal, based in Austin, Texas. Originally from NY, he has an MFA in Fiction from Texas State University and an MA in Literature from NYU, and his work has been nominated for awards and appeared in many literary journals, such as The Gettysburg Review, Passages North, and Hobart. In his free time, he is a musician and runs a boutique advertising agency, Mandel Marketing, and he can be found online at www.phillipscottmandel.com.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share a story about what first drew you to writing over other forms of storytelling?

I’ve been writing stories since I was a little kid. I remember riding the bus in fifth grade and reading my stories to the girl of my dreams, Jessica, and trying to make her laugh. Later, I would steal my father’s legal pads and fill them, longhand, with fantasy novels, maps, comic book universes, and the like.

You are a successful author. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Tenacity. For the vast majority of authors, it takes a long, long time to achieve success. Sure, some people get a freakish measure of good luck early on, but everyone else has to work hard to learn how to write, and to gain readers. You need to be tenacious and keep going on, even when it’s difficult, and you want to give up, and you get twelve rejection letters a week.

Empathy. To my detriment, I sometimes have a debilitating amount of empathy for others. When I was a kid I once punched someone in the face and then began crying because I’d hurt them. But this is how you can create characters — by feeling what they feel, and imagining their life experience.

Curiosity. I used to read the dictionary. And the encyclopedia. They say good writing comes from good thinking, and if you aren’t curious about the world, your thinking and your writing will be boring and stale.

Can you tell us a bit about the interesting or exciting projects you are working on or wish to create? What are your goals for these projects?

I launched Abandon Journal in April of 2021, and it’s been thrilling to see how many, and how enthusiastically, people have responded to it. I wanted to create a space for people to abandon preconceived notions about what they should write. For example, people sometimes (mistakenly) think so-called ‘genre fiction’ doesn’t belong in so-called ‘literary journals.’ Nonsense.

The other project I’m super excited about is a huge fantasy series that tackles racism, fascism, and cranky old sorcerers.

Wonderful. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Let’s begin with a basic definition so that all of us are on the same page. How do you define sci-fi or fantasy? How is it different from speculative fiction?

That’s an interesting question, because I’m finding that people are blurring the lines more often these days between all the different genres, whether you call it “sci-fi,” “fantasy,” or “speculative fiction.” That said, “speculative fiction” has tended to seem like a workaround for so-called literary writers to dabble in genre fiction without being labelled genre fiction, and therefore relegated to the SF/F section of the bookstore, so to speak. At Abandon Journal, we like to read it all — but we still denote a difference between them, of course. In very general terms, sci-fi usually has fictional elements that are rooted in the “possible,” from a scientific or technological perspective. Fantasy is usually fiction of the impossible, such as magic. This creates some strange inconsistencies, though; for example, if we have time travel due to very advanced technology, it’s sci-fi; whereas if we have time travel due to casting a magical spell, it’s fantasy. Yet, as far as I can tell, time travel is impossible either way. So maybe we shouldn’t really worry about it all that much.

Speculative fiction, on the other hand, tends towards realism or literary fiction that contains some supernatural or non-real elements; for example, an otherwise realistic world where everyone goes blind, or perhaps a straightforward detective story set within an alternative history, such as The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, where Chabon is literally speculating on what would’ve happened if Israel hadn’t been created after World War II and European Jews created a homeland and nation state in Sitka, Alaska.

Nevertheless, I think these labels are squishy and a writer should concentrate much more on the work itself and what they are trying to say, rather than how other people are going to market it, or what category it falls into.

It seems that despite countless changes in media and communication technologies, novels and written fiction always survive, and as the rate of change increases with technology, written sci-fi becomes more popular. Why do you think that is?

We live in a world of the increasingly unknown. The rate of change continues to defy reason. I was born in 1980, and the world is in some ways almost unrecognizable since then. Yet I’ve already lived through several different paradigm shifts in my life, and I anticipate there will continue to be more, and ever more. Science Fiction is a genre that is uniquely equipped to deal with the unknown and the as-yet-unknown-unknown. It’s really fun reading older science fiction and seeing how much was predicted by far-seeing authors from fifty to a hundred years ago (and how much was absolutely wrong). But as we as a population increasingly don’t know what to expect in our future — from political upheaval to dehumanization via technological advancement to AI to climate change — science fiction is a way of predicting and thinking through some answers. It’s both a comfort and a warning.

In your opinion, what are the benefits to reading sci-fi, and how do they compare to watching sci-fi on film and television?

The benefits of reading sci-fi vs watching it on TV is the same as the benefit of reading anything over watching it on TV, including the news, history, or children’s programming. Reading is far more mentally and emotionally stimulation (and taxing), as your mind must do the work of processing the information and creating the reality, versus having it fed to you. Nevertheless, despite the extra work involved — or perhaps because of it — reading sci-fi is typically much more enjoyable, in the long run. Rarely do people think the movie is better than the book — even classics such as The Godfather — and there is a reason for this. Who wants to eat food that has already been chewed?

Now don’t get me wrong: I love watching sci-fi movies. Terminator 2 is my favorite movie of all time, which I’ve seen about five hundred times. But if I watch the New York Jets lose on TV, which I do most Sundays every fall, I don’t feel like I’m actually playing football, or getting a workout (despite how tiring and dispiriting it is to be a Jets fan). So the experience of watching Terminator 2 still doesn’t match up to the experience of, say, reading The Three-Body Problem.

What authors and artists, dead or alive, inspired you to write?

Growing up I was a huge fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Jordan, Stephen King, and the team of Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, as well as George R. R. Martin, of course. Other writers such as Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Raymond Carver influenced my writing as well.

If you could ask your favourite Science Fiction and Fantasy author a question, what would it be?

This is a tough one, but I’d like to know about George R. R. Martin’s experience writing ASOIF. Has the series, and the world, become so overwhelming and large that it’s stultifying or difficult to keep writing? Have the expectations from the audience become so great that it’s not fun anymore? Or is it a matter of perfectionism, trying to get it just right? I want to know what it’s like to create that huge of a world, and have it embraced by so many millions of people — and how to create art in that milieu.

We’d like to learn more about your writing. How would you describe yourself as an author? Can you please share a specific passage that you think exemplifies your style?

It’s hard to describe oneself because how I see my own writing, and what I’m going for, is probably not the same as what others take from my writing. That being said, here’s one (longish) passage from a short story, “Last Lectures on Fiddlesticks,” that I’m particularly proud of, as it combines the real and the unreal with truths about life. It has a joke (whether or not you find it funny, well, that’s unfortunately out of my control), but it is mostly concerned with emotion and the human experience. It is also representative of my style, which is somewhat maximalist (though not always this pretentious, as the narrator of this particularly story is, himself, something of a little prince). In the world of this story, the game Fiddlesticks is an analog to chess, and the narrator is a Grand Master whose sister committed suicide years earlier. The form of the story is a published version of old lectures he’d delivered about the game via shortwave radio years earlier (thus the editor’s footnotes), and he keeps veering off into personal stories about his memories of playing against his sister when they were children:

I was a late bloomer, but when I did finally reach zugzwang, I found myself tormented by the inevitable choice: either give up playing Fiddlesticks and be a normal boy, or continue covertly and remain an outcast in school and society at large. I still had two years, officially. I chose the former, as any sane person would do. I saw my opportunity and I seized it, but at such a cost. How could I have known I would have so little time left with Alexandra?

Even if I chose otherwise, my time was limited, regardless. At some point Alexandra would grow up too, she would take an interest in boys and fashion, we would both go away to college. She would become a lawyer, or a surgeon like our father. I did not know the pain she was in. If I’d known I would have tried to help, if I could reach her. I would have told her she was no burden, not ever. How could I have known? We spent our youth hiding from our father and pretending everything was okay; we watched The Twilight Zone and played Fiddlesticks. She was fearless. When she was twenty-seven she called me from a hospital, her voice trembling and childlike. This was the only time we spoke of the pain.

In an earlier lecture I said that one must always be thinking of the endgame, that it doesn’t matter how you play the game, so long as you win. This is profoundly wrong.

The opening, in fact, is precious — and so is the middle game — and if you fail to enjoy them while you are playing, as I did, know that you cannot enjoy them in retrospect. The problem with the endgame is that once you’ve reached it, it means the game is over, and you cannot ever get it back. Thus, even if you win, you still lose, because you are no longer playing Fiddlesticks with your most treasured opponent.

Adults absurdly conflate imagination with immaturity, to the irreversible detriment of their children’s well-being. What if I were to say, right now in this radio program, that I miss my sister and I wish I could go back to that time in my life when, despite the crushing malaise, we sat in our parents’ cheerless living room passing the afternoon, when Alexandra drank cokes and smirked precociously, when the brightest part of the day was checking the mailbox, when I could look at my Fiddlesticks set (which I kept in a repurposed cardboard humidor once belonging to my father) and see infinite possibilities? It would mean nothing. Happiness is for the birds, as my mother often told me.

Based on your own experience and success, what are the “Five Things You Need To Write Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories?” If you can, please share a story or example for each.

1. Unceasing imagination. It’s far more difficult than it sounds, but it’s what distinguishes the books we still read years after they were first published, or read again and again, with those we don’t. A good example of this is Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris, wherein the ocean on the planet Solaris is an alien intelligence. Similarly, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time is mind-expanding (ha, literally). For a short story example, there is this insane piece called “Spar” by Kij Johnson (content warning, not for the faint of heart) that is, to say the least, inventive. I also recommend “Animalcula: A Young Scientist’s Guide to New Creatures” by Seth Fried.
2. Character-building. Sometimes, SF/F sacrifices character for plot or setting, and this can put an otherwise great story in serious danger of being unreadable. For me, A Song of Ice and Fire does character really well, and I think this is one of many reasons for its success (world-building is another, but I only have 5 “things” to enumerate).
3. Playfulness. Don’t always take yourself or your work too seriously, and don’t be afraid to have some humor in there to dispel some of the tension. This doesn’t mean don’t be serious about writing, or your career, by the way, it just means that you (and your reader) can have some fun. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is a great example of this, but I would also recommend the stories of Karen Russell and Kelly Link.
4. Style. By this, I mean strong writing. Good writing. No clichés. No amateurish usage of exclamation points, or hack jokes, or vague descriptions. Developing this takes a lot of time and practice, and you can actually see writers develop in their careers by comparing early works with later ones. A masterful stylist is Samuel R. Delany: read Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand for a masterclass on this. Charles Yu is another incredible writer — and I was not surprised at all that Interior Chinatown won the National Book Award. You can improve your style by writing a lot, but also by reading a lot. I am always baffled by people who tell me they want to write books but hardly ever read them.
5. Relevance. Earlier I was talking about how SF/F and speculative fiction deal with impossible or fictional elements of the world, as opposed to straightforward literary realism. Faster-than-light travel, sentient oceans, magic. The best work takes these elements as starting points towards larger truths; that is, magic doesn’t exist simply for the sake of being cool or fun, but because they are telling larger truths about the world of the reader. This doesn’t mean you have to be overtly political, and you should definitely not be sentimental; but it’s a worthwhile exercise to think deeply about what you are trying to say with your writing. For example, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl imagines a future based on threats we are dealing with right now: global warming, biotech, and other catastrophes. Orwell’s 1984 is a meditation on fascism; Huxley’s A Brave New World, utopian social engineering. The 2015 anthology Loosed Upon The World, edited by John Joseph Adams, is a great place to start for so-called ‘cli-fi’ — but my point is that this kind of writing has a level of poignancy beyond just entertainment value, because the stories are relevant to the world of the reader.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Entertainment, Business, VC funding, and Sports read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we both tag them :-)

I would love to chat with Charles Yu and find out more about his process.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Find my writing at phillipscottmandel.com, my literary journal at abandjournal.com, and my ad agency and mandelmarketing.com.

Thank you for these excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent. We wish you continued success.