5 November 2003

The Devil, God and Cyperpunk: An Interview with Lyda Morehouse
by Susan Harris

Susan Harris lives deep in the frozen Midwest with her partner and their two cats.

In 1997, Lyda Morehouse sold her short-short "Irish Blood" for $9.23 to Dreams of Decadence, and thus officially became a professional writer. Since then, she's had a number of short stories published in various magazines, including "Twelve Traditions" (Science Fiction Age), and "Everything in Its Place" (Tales of the Unanticipated), both of which received honorable mentions in Gardner Dozois' Year's Best Science Fiction #17 (1999) and #16 (1998).

However, Lyda never really felt she'd "made it" until Laura Anne Gilman at Penguin Putnam/Roc bought her novels Archangel Protocol (May 2001) and Fallen Host (May 2002). Archangel Protocol is the winner of the 2002 Shamus for best original paperback P.I. novel as well as the winner of the 5th Annual Barnes & Noble Maiden Voyage Award for outstanding work by a debut author. It was also nominated the Romantic Times Critic's Choice Award for best science fiction novel of 2001. Lyda is currently hard at work on a three-book contract for Roc. Messiah Node, the third book in the Archangel Protocol universe, was published by Roc in June.

In her spare time, Lyda is a stringer for Science Fiction Chronicle, a trade magazine for science fiction professionals. Lyda is a founding member of Broad Universe, and a member of he National Writers Union, the Midwest Imaginative Fiction Writers Association, the Loft, Romance Writers of America, as well as Science Fiction Writers of America. The biggest news in Lyda's life is that her life partner, Shawn, gave birth to a happy, healthy baby boy—Mason Gale Morehouse Rounds—on July 23, 2003. Lyda, Shawn, Mason and four cats live in the Midway neighborhood of St. Paul, Minn. This interview was conducted in October 2002.

We may as well start with all the origins stuff. How long have you been a writer? Why do you think you became a writer? What do you think brought you into speculative fiction, specifically?

Oh, sure, start with the hard stuff.

Let me think. I can't really put my finger on what brought me into speculative fiction, per se. I've just always had an affinity for the strange, I guess. Though, in some ways, I guess I'm kind of a media fan. My first exposure to science fiction was seeing Star Wars as a nine year old and leaving the theater completely and totally enthralled. I wanted to BE Han Solo. So, I spent my formative years in space, I guess. Playing the part of the rogue spaceship captain in the city park with a curling iron attachment for a blaster.

Thank the Goddess that George Lucas is a slow director. It gave me time in between movies to discover movie novelizations. Then, after I'd read all of those, as well as all the spin-offs (like Han Solo's Revenge) in my local library, I discovered that the people who wrote those books, like James Blish and Joan Vinge, also wrote other books. My library was smart, too. They put all the movie novelizations for Star Wars and Star Trek right next to the Nebula winner collections. It didn't take me long to discover those.

So, when it came time to write, I naturally fell into science fiction.

When was that exactly? It's hard to say. I have a copy of a typewritten story that has a beginning, middle, and an end from 1980. It's wish fulfillment Star Wars fanfic, dreadful, and deeply embarrassing. Previous to that I filled notebooks with vignettes of Deryni (Katherine Kurtz) and Dragonrider (Anne McCaffery) fanfic. Luckily, I came of age in the time before the Internet, so none of this fanfic is available to the public. I did start writing some semi-original crap (loosely based on Vampire: The Masquerade) on a listserv, back when those things still didn't have the "e" at the end. But thankfully most of that is still only available on the listowner's archives and not even Google-able.

But, during this fanfic stage I was not at all serious about writing. I was just kind of killing time and venting my overactive imagination. It never occurred to me that a person could sell this stuff until I took a writing class at the Loft, which is kind of a community-education organization except aimed only at writers and writing related courses. At that point, I'd started an original novel called Sidhe Promised, which I sometimes playfully give the subtitle: the Dyke, the Fey, and the IRA—a book I still love and someday would like to find a home for, but it's in desperate need of revision.

So, I don't know if that answers the last question, which is why did I think I became a writer, except that my answer probably is out of boredom, having too much time on my hands, having day-jobs with little to do and access to a word processing program. See, because when I have spare brain space, I always make up stories and characters. Walking to the store, driving to work, sitting on the bus... my head is filling that time with stories. I have zillions of worlds whizzing around in my head at any given time. For me, writing was about remembering them, and excising the ones who were getting too big to house in my brain, you know? The Athenas ready to burst.

How do you actually get your writing done? When do you fit it into your day? Do you have a routine that you follow, or a special environment that you write in, or do you just haul your laptop around everywhere with you?

Well, I mostly write at night. After the 9 to 5 day-job, after dinner is made, after the cats are fed, and after the dishes washed. Which, frankly, sucks. I'm a morning person, but not enough of one to be willing to get up before 6:00 am, which is when I have to get up to be ready to go to work.

I used to have a better routine before I had deadlines. I used to say: "I will write 425 words every day," and I'd stick to it. I also used to outline before I had deadlines. Now, I just write whenever the hell I can, however much I can, and with spontaneous stream-of-consciousness plotting from Hell. None of which I would recommend. Especially as this usually leads to a meltdown about a month before the book is due.

So, I'm really kind of a chaos writer.

How did you go about putting together the vision of the future that we get in Archangel Protocol? Can you remember when you first started working on the idea?

I can tell you exactly when I got the idea for Archangel Protocol. It was after watching The X-Files. There was this episode where the devil comes to Crowley High as a substitute teacher, called Die Hand Die Verletzt. I spent the whole episode waiting for two things—I really wanted Scully to turn to Mulder and say, "Hey, do you know what this means? If there is a devil, then there must be a God!" And, secondly, I really thought it would have been cool to have the archangel Michael show up as a cop, as Michael is the patron of the police, and help them solve the crime. Of course, neither of those things happened. So, the idea started kicking around in my head.

At the same time I was also watching a show called American Gothic, which is arguably about Satan as a small-town Southern sheriff. I loved that show so much that I joined a fan listserv about it. I got into a number of heated arguments as to whether Sheriff Buck really was the Satan and whether or not a person could write a story in which ultimate good fought ultimate evil in an interesting way. I said yes. My friend Dave Milloway said no. So, I decided to go out and prove that it could be done.

And they say T.V. is bad for you.

Well, whether T.V. is bad for you depends on how you watch it, right? It's interesting that you built this entire future based on what you wanted from these stories and didn't get. That's something you hear writers say all the time, but in your case, it sheds new light on that Satan fixation that you've talked about elsewhere. It seems like what you were really waiting for was for Satan's shenanigans to finally attract the attentions of the good guys. Is that part of what you like about Satan—that he forces an otherwise remote God to actually get involved?

Wow, I honestly had never thought about it in those terms, but I think you're right.

I know that after that X-Files episode, I really found myself thinking about the horror genre in broad terms. Why was it, I wondered, that modern readers were so willing to believe that the devil could be real, active, malicious, and personal, but that God was never part of that equation? I mean, it seems to me that if you buy into the Christian myth, you ought to buy the whole thing. But you never see a scene where, in the face of ultimate evil, our heroine decides to pray and lo, a miracle occurs. Yet, no one has any doubts that if a bunch of Satanists sing ooga-booga in the basement the Devil HIMSELF will show up to do their bidding, even if it's something petty like poking their enemy with a stick.

People who deftly write about the Devil in extremely religious terms, ala the Exorcist, tend to forget a fundamental fact about Satan: he is an angel. Without God, the Devil would not exist. In fact, I remember watching the movie The Prophecy, and once again waiting for our heroes, who knew perfectly well that they were dealing with a second war in Heaven, to go to God. But, in the end, who do they turn to for advice? Lucifer. Hello?! Lucifer was the big fat loser of the last war in heaven! That's like taking advice on how to stop an invading army from Poland. Not once did these idiots think to themselves, "Hey, I know, let's ask Michael. He kicked Satan's ass. Maybe he can help us fight Gabriel."

But that's a little off your point, which I really want to come back to. I hadn't thought about Satan as the great gadfly, but I think I may have been unconsciously channeling that idea. I know I craved an active counterpart to Satan, because how can Satan be the Adversary if he doesn't have an equally powerful and crafty opposite? If Satan is powerful, active, and personal, then so must be the other side. And yet, in modern literature, you don't see that very often. I brought in a sexy angel and a flaming sword for a reason. I felt they had been missing too much from the modern mindset.

Plotwise, both of your books revolve around the question of whether spirituality can be part of virtual reality: Are the LINK angels real. Do the Dragon and Page have soul, and so on. What got you interested in virtual reality? What are the challenges involved in making a virtual universe accessible to your reader?

01001111011110010010000100100000. Or in ASCII, "Oy!" I mean, right there is the problem. How do you make what is basically a lot of on and off switches interesting to read? What I've decided is that you can't really. You have to go the Neuromancer route—make up pretty images that kind of sort of correspond to computer functions. I found that otherwise, the more you try to make virtual reality anything like real-life, the more boring it gets. I loved Melissa Scott's Trouble and Her Friends, but I have to tell you, there's one scene where our hera is trying to break past a firewall and Scott decides to keep it real. HOURS pass. I skimmed it.

What got me interested? Really digging the cyberpunk movement, I guess. I read as much cyberpunk stuff as I could get my hands on in the 80s and 90s. There are still a few novels I haven't read, but it's by far my favorite subgenre/movement.

One of the things that interested me most about Fallen Host is that suddenly the Muslim characters and Muslim cosmology became much more central to your universe. Fallen Host has to have been in the can before September 2001, so you would seem to have been ahead of the curve on this one. What got you interested in Islam as a belief system, and how if at all did that affect the relationship in your universe between good and evil?

Actually what's really spooky is that my revised manuscript for Fallen Host was due back at Roc on September 11, 2001. It's weird to look back at my calendar now and see that date circled in red. And, for about a month or two, while Penguin Putnam—which has its offices 12 or so blocks from the World Trade Center—got back on its feet, I was consumed by deeply selfish thoughts about my writing career: Would they publish a book with Muslim heroes now?

Obviously they did. And to (editor) Laura Anne Gilman's credit, the issue never came up—other than in my own paranoid little head. I never asked, and she never suggested it was ever even a remote possibility that they would reject the book.

As to why I thought to wrote about it then... Kismet? Freakish access to the collective unconscious? I don't know.

I do know that my vision of the universe of Archangel Protocol always included separate novels that were "tinted," if you will, by the various flavors of the religions that make up the "people of the book." So, Archangel Protocol was meant to be my Christian flavored book, and Fallen Host, the Muslim one. Messiah Node has a Jewish bent.

But, again, that doesn't really answer your question. I think, if anything, educating myself about Islam prior to September 11 helped me make my Muslim characters more human. I wasn't tempted as I might have been post-September 11 to paint my Muslim characters with too broad a brush—I wasn't writing against anything, you know? Other than the stereotypes I already knew existed. In fact, I'd already been feeling really guilty that I'd kind of done the cliché thing with Mouse, who is a Muslim, by making him the bad-guy in Archangel Protocol. So, I started Fallen Host with a sense of trying to make sure that my readers understood that I'd thought Mouse was failed as a human, not because of his religious beliefs. I purposely set out to make Page a fully rounded and interesting Muslim.

But September 11 has added a weird new dimension to my novels—there's no denying that. I've been told that post-September 11 readings of Archangel Protocol are much more eerie, what with the idea of an attack on American shores, with the Medusa bomb. Unconsciously, I referred to the Bronx as "ground zero." Now, of course, that brings a particular image into the mind of American readers.

I suppose to some Fallen Host might read like a kind of apologia for Islam. And that may explain what seem to be slower sales with that book. Although I got the best compliment I ever could. Timothy Furnish, who has a Ph.D. in Islamic history, and who even happened to have written his dissertation on eschatological figures like Dajjal, read Fallen Host ... and liked it. So, I apparently got some things right.

One of the editorial reviews posted on Amazon.com talks about Fallen Host as a far more entertaining alternative to the "Left Behind" series, which takes the Apocalypse veeeeeeery seriously. How would you describe your personal investment in the belief systems you bring into this universe? To what extent—and how—do you take God, Satan, the angels, and all that jazz seriously?

I was raised in a Unitarian Universalist fellowship, so I have a very funky relationship with spiritual things. Unitarians come in a lot of flavors, but my family is definitely the non-Christian, secular humanist variety. I've since fallen away from secular humanism and become, uh, more...faithful—as in full of faith in certain things. But I was raised to have, in my heart, a deep respect for the traditions and beliefs of the world, tempered by a kind of playfulness that allows for questioning. I, myself, wouldn't want a higher power who didn't have a sense of humor, who didn't allow for a little teasing, a little poking.

But do I believe in that higher power? Yes, I do. Very seriously.

Do I believe in the apocalypse? The Rapture? No. Nuh-huh. No way. I find it ENDLESSLY fascinating, though, (and a little bit funny) which is how I came to write about it. And I write about it with what is, I hope, a certain seriousness/playfulness. I mean, I think questions of faith are very important. To the people of my novels, these things are real and have real consequences, but life is a complicated thing and so is religion and faith. I try not to be flip with these issues, though. I spend a lot of time thinking about my cosmology. I may poke a little fun occasionally, but I hope that it is obvious that it's the kind of humor that comes from a kind of respect, not scorn.

Do I believe in Satan and angels? Not as I have written them. I don't imagine ever running into the archangel Michael at the Mall of America, no. Rebeckah in Archangel Protocol gave the readers what is, in fact, the author's belief system regarding angels. I believe that sometimes the higher power works through people, and that, for that brief moment, those people "appear" to be angels. And when people risk for the sake of justice, those people are also angels. Which is part of why I have Michael running around looking like a man. I kind of wanted to underscore the idea that angels could be people (and actually, if you read your Bible, you'll know that the first time angels "appear" they wander into camp, eat, drink, and sleep, just like normal people. Later on they get kind of ghostly, but that first time they seem very mortal.)

Still, I think if anyone who loved the "Left Behind" series picked up Archangel Protocol or any of its follow-up books, they'd be deeply shaken. Perhaps partly because I take their cosmology seriously in a very Unitarian-way. :-)

Does that make sense? I think you threw me by the word "serious." I don't want to be seen as someone who is being careless with religion, because I'm trying not to be. But at the same time, it's fairly obvious that I am an outsider looking in. And because of that I have a unique perspective that sometimes leads to that playful questioning.

Interestingly, I have never gotten any hate mail from fundamentalist Christians. One person on Amazon.com said that I was a Christian basher, but then they went on to say they liked the book—so I'm not sure how to take that. I've heard from a number of priests and ex-priests and seminary students who enjoyed my books. And, in many ways, those are the people who I'm writing for—those who can look at their faith both seriously and with a sense of humor. A remarkable number of Christians and Muslims and Jews can do that.

I guess I asked the question as a way in to talking about how your writing relates to your own spiritual/emotional life. People still have this attitude about books that are considered 'popular culture'—that they're just entertainment and that you can't deal with Deep Meaningful Things in a book that is going to be available at the checkout counter in the drug store. Whereas it has always seemed to me that Archangel Protocol and Fallen Host are taking on the big universal questions, faith being the central one. Deidre's pregnant at the end of Archangel Protocol, and that left a lot of those big questions unresolved. Since then, as a lot of the people reading this interview will know, you and your partner Shawn lost your daughter Ella. How do you think that experience will be reflected in your books?

I don't know how Ella's life will affect my writing. I'm sure it will. Most of the writing I've done since her death has been journaling, however.

Not to give any spoilers, but in Messiah Node we return to Michael and Deidre and their daughter, Amariah, and because of how the book ends, there will be a lot of opportunity for me to explore the issue of loss, if I decide to go there. (Again, a book I finished before Ella died, yet which has this strange kind of precognition element to it. I mean, for Michael, it's ALL about being a parent and yet not getting to be a parent at the same time. Which is exactly what I'm going through right now, and Shawn, of course, even more so).

One thing I've never tackled in the universe of Archangel Protocol is what happens after death. Part of the reason for that, I think, is because I don't know. I mean, I haven't ever even put a whole lot of thought into it. Not in my fictitious world, nor my real life. I don't even have any good religion of origin to react against, since Unitarians are very focused on living well, doing good here and now, and not worrying about the afterlife in terms of who's "saved" and who isn't.

There's a part at the end of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 where one of the characters (I believe it's the "book" who has memorized the Bible) talks about how he believes that his grandfather, who recently died, has "left his thumbprint" on the convolutions of his brain. That people basically achieve eternal life by affecting others, changing the world they live in, and, hopefully, improving it. That's always been a big part of my personal belief system.

Shawn and I talk about Ella being our little spirit who came to us when the veil between the worlds was thinnest (Ella was conceived on Halloween). And it amazes me how someone who officially never got to be "alive," never got to take a first breath, still managed to profoundly affect so many people. Ella left her thumbprint—although perhaps it was her footprint, since her feet were so big—on a lot of people's brains.

We had almost a hundred people show up for Ella's memorial service. And this after our minister warned us that usually infant deaths, and stillbirths in particular, don't get any kind of support because, first of all, often people don't do memorials for stillbirths, and secondly, most people's friends can't deal with such early loss—understandably. Some of the people who attended were, of course, close friends and family. But, also, people who we'd fallen out of touch with came back into our lives to stand with us at the hardest moment we may ever face. It was a strangely uplifting and powerful experience.

Shawn and I got an even larger number of sympathy cards—from all over the world—and they're still coming, though Ella's been gone over three months. Sometimes we get notes from people who knew me only through my writing and heard about the pregnancy and loss from keeping up with my current events on my webpage. My father's professorial colleagues collected money to plant a veritable forest of trees in Ella's memory on the Viterbo University campus (where my father teaches psychology). Our friends—again though, sometimes also people who only knew us tangentially —contributed over a thousand dollars to a memorial fund.

Hell, I'm impressed that people remembered to treat my parents and Shawn's as grandparents. Some even sent them cards. To me, this is awesome. I mean, it inspires my awe that so many people truly understood our loss, truly understood that we are a family now and always will be.

And, as a parent, I find myself oddly proud of Ella and what she's inspired. I mean, what else can we hope for in life but to touch people in some way? Ella did that. When I miss holding her in my arms, I think of that and I find a way to feel hopeful, to take comfort. She taught Shawn and I a number of things too.

One of the things I'm grateful for is that every day since the day we knew Shawn was pregnant with Ella, we kept a daily journal. It was actually one of these cheesy books you can buy at any chain bookstore with goofy bits of information about the baby's development in the womb and space for notes—for how mom is feeling, places to celebrate milestones, like hearing baby's heart for the first time. Things like that. I especially remember what the book referred to as gonad week, because I whispered "ovaries" to Shawn's belly every night, hoping to help inspire a gender choice. :-)

Anyway, every day that Shawn was pregnant I brought her breakfast in bed and we took time—every single day of the 266 days—to read the journal and write in it. In this way, no day with Ella was unmarked or uncelebrated. And, I'm so grateful for that now that it's made me look at the other things in my life that I might take for granted. In fact, one of the ways we survived the days right after Ella's death was to continue part of the tradition in a way. Every evening now, just before bed, we write down in our We'Moon Calendar one thing that each of us is grateful for every day. For the days right after Ella's death it was just "friends and family" over and over and over again. But it kept us focused on survival, you know?

So, no, I won't be surprised if Ella finds away to touch people through my writing too. I've come to believe that she's just like that, a natural teacher, the rascal.

Wow. Thank you for telling that story. I can't really think of anything to follow that, except to say that wherever your writing goes after Messiah Node, I'll be there. Thanks so much for talking with us.