Monalisa Foster discusses how she learned English with the help of Robert Heinlein; her favorite themes; and the story behind the title for her latest novelette. Read “The Deviltree” in our [September/October issue, on sale now!]
Analog Editor: What is the story behind this piece?
Monalisa Foster: The idea for The Deviltree came out of a panel at FantaSci 2022. Robert E. Hampson (often a science guest of honor at cons due to his neuroscientist background) had put together this panel where two teams (a science team and a fantasy team) were tasked with creating a fictional creature. And then they were going to fight.
Charles E. Gannon, Julie Frost, and I were on the science team and we were throwing around some ideas. One of my ideas got vetoed and didn’t make it into the final product—we won the fight by the way, and no, my idea wouldn’t have mattered—for that panel, but that idea would just not let me go. I kept coming back to it again and again and that’s when I realized that I had to write it into a story.
AE: How did the title for this piece come to you?
MF: The title was probably the hardest part, to be honest. It sat there as “FantaSci Creature” and I had this huge sticky note stuck to the monitor that said “Do not send it until you have a real title.” There was some genuine fear there that I would to that, because, well, I have done exactly that kind of thing. It’s a little worse than forgetting to send the attachments to that well-thought out and composed e-mail that goes out not just to your peers but the boss and the boss’s boss and so on.
Initially it was going to be “The Mathematician and the Deviltree” but that sounded boring. I think mathematicians (and physicists) can be cool and can be heroic, but would anyone else? So after playing around with that and other options, I decided to KISS—keep it simple stupid.
AE: What made you think of Analog for this story?
MF: Space opera being my main genre, I didn’t set out to write a hard-SF story, but when it was all said and done, I realized that it was on the hard-SF side of the SF spectrum and when I asked myself who would publish this, Analog Science Fiction & Fact was the first name to pop-up. I think this was my third submission and both of the other rejections I’d gotten asked for more, so I decided to give it another try.
And now I have to tell you about the acceptance. It’s FantaSci 2023. It’s one year to the day, the Friday of the con, and I’m walking out of the NSFW panel from the same exact room where we’d held the creature panel last year. I check my e-mails. And because this email started with “Apologies . . .” I thought for sure that I’d gotten another rejection. Since Melissa Olthoff (who’d been on the previous year’s creature panel with me but on the fantasy team) and I were heading to my room to have some pizza, I had to give her my phone. “Is this a rejection?” (because I couldn’t believe it and thought I had to be reading it wrong). She smiled and said, “No, it’s not. It’s an acceptance. ” Then we squealed like little girls, scaring everyone in the hall. One year to the day. Really. I still get goosebumps thinking about it.
AE: Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing? If yes, what and why?
MF: Freedom, liberty, and personal responsibility. I’m a survivor of communism and find myself writing to these themes even when I don’t set out to. I like to give my protagonists full character arcs (yes, even in a short story) and this was no exception. In this case we have a young mathematician who realizes that she has to step up and take personal responsibility. She’s loosely based on my own daughter, who is an actual mathematician. I tried to teach her to do hard things—or rather do things even when they’re hard–because failure can be great teacher. It can teach you a lot of things, but the most important of those is knowing how to get back up. That is the true source of confidence. The challenge with The Deviltree was balancing it in favor or Story and Science.
AE: What is your process?
MF: I am a pantser. That means that while I may have a vague idea of genre or setting or character, or even a solid idea of the kind of story I’m sitting down to write, I don’t have an outline. Unlike a discovery writer, I don’t sit down without any idea of what I’m going to write. I have, at a minimum, some notion of genre (science fiction) even if the sub-genre (like hard-sf vs space opera vs mil-sf) isn’t as solid.
I’ve put serious effort into outlining (plotting) this last year, and found that I tend to come up with another way NOT to write the story. I never stick to these outlines, but I did find them useful as a checklist, a way of keeping myself on track for when I’m stuck. It helped me look at my stories in a new way: you’re in this stage of the story but doing something that doesn’t belong here; your story idea is the climax, not the beginning; your pacing is off here because you’re not to the mid-point yet. So now I update my plot/plan as I go but I’m mostly pantsing it. Imagine you’re planning a trip to Europe and while you know that you’ll stop in London, Paris, and Moscow, you don’t know exactly how you’ll get from one to the other. Some people apparently call it plotsing. But it really does depend on the story. The Deviltree was pantsed. I had the opening and I was deep inside the tree devil’s head and actually had to pull out a bit because it was too alien and unrelatable. So I rewrote it so it was more readable. And I had the climax, the story solution as it were, but had to figure out how to get from where I started to where I wanted to go.
AE: What inspired you to start writing?
MF: I taught myself English by translating Heinlein’s juvenilles and went on to devour pretty much the entire science-fiction section in middle- and high-school. I even wrote one novel when I was in high school, and another between semesters while in college. Neither one saw the light of day. I continued reading, eventually discovered the work of Lois McMaster Bujold, and she started me thinking that maybe it was time to give writing another try. A trip to the library with my kids placed the book Samurai by Turnbull in my path. I just happened to be reading a book on genetic engineering for my job and another one on nanotechnology for fun, and that’s how the idea for Ravages of Honor came about. The rest just flowed from that. Since I read across many genres, including historical fiction, Romance, Literature, and thrillers, I guess it was inevitable.
Instead of chasing the next winning literary lottery ticket, the current trend or marketing guru promising you easy anything, do something that will make you a better writer. It can be anything.
AE: What is the weirdest research rabbit-hole that working on a story has led you down?
MF: The evolutionary biology concept of r/K theory. It has to do biological traits that trade off between quantity and quality of offspring, i.e. the different strategies that predators and prey have developed to survive. Of particular interest to me was the how and why of bonobos and chimps and how that had led them to create radically different societies. And of course, the application of such theories to humans, who, unlike animals, have far more ability to influence the r/K-selection processes, especially via technology.
So how does technology change that r/K-selection? How much of the survival drives can be altered by science and technology? It was one of the main reasons I started writing Conquest, the first book in my Ravages of Honor series.
AE: What are you reading right now?
MF: Peter Zeihan’s The End of the World is Just the Beginning. It’s about the collapse of globalization. I found his other books terribly facsinating, often in a scary way. Since I am—in a way—in the business of predicting where we’re going and why, not just as nations, but as a species, I felt compelled to read more, even thought the end of the world is not something I want to think or write about. It’s impossible for me to read something and not think about how this (no matter if the subject is geopolitics or the chemistry of wine or cheesemaking) could be used in a story or for a character or a milieu.
I’m never not writing, even when I’m reading.
AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
MF: Three actually. First, writing is a marathon, not a sprint. Instead of chasing the next winning literary lottery ticket, the current trend or marketing guru promising you easy anything, do something that will make you a better writer. It can be anything. Learning a new language counts. It will teach you so much about your own and make you a better writer. Take a class. Maybe your next story idea will come from it, or benefit from it.
Second, craft is evergreen. Spend more time on your craft than on your marketing. And spend more time writing than anything else, because words don’t write themselves and practice is going to do far more for you than anything else.
Third, do something hard. Everyone else is doing “fun and easy.” Don’t be like everyone.
AE: Many of our Analog authors are interested in science. Do you have any scientific background, and does it impact your fiction?
MF: At one time I wanted to be an astronaut, so I majored in physics and would have become an astrophysicist had things turned out differently, so, yes, that background had a huge impact on my fiction. It also had a huge impact on the careers I ended up in. I started out as an electrical engineer in the semiconductor industry and ended up in clinical research (radiation oncology and nuclear medicine).
This past week I was reworking a short story that capitalized heavily on my training designing semiconductors and on my nostalgia for the Apollo missions. Likewise for Promethea Invicta, a hard-SF novella I wrote back in 2018, where they mine Helium-3 for use in He3-He3 reactions. I went back and looked at some NASA-sponsored plans for utilizing the Moon’s resources, particularly the He3, and what would be involved in that.
The donai—the genetically engineered samurai in my Ravages of Honor series, a space opera with nanotechnology and swords that does NOT fade to black–came out of the aforementioned r/K-evolutionary biology theories and the things I learned while running radiation oncology trials. While a space opera (not hard-SF) that focuses heavily on human drives (including the drive to procreate) not hyperdrives, the story could not happen if it wasn’t anchored in science. It’s not a story wearing an SF skin that could be taken away and still leave the story intact.
When I pitched Threading the Needle (coming from Baen Books, Dec. 5, 2023) to Toni Weisskopf, it was with the science aspect of it in mind. Threading the Needle is a space opera as well, one with grand adventure (think Westworld or Firefly), but also with moderate-to-heavy anchoring in cybernetics as well as genetic engineering. Like all my work, it’s character-focused and I’m very excited about it because it allowed me to work in a setting I’d never written in before–think cowboys and samurai–and pay homage to one of my favorite John Wayne movies.
All of my stories have come from some interest in science—whether r/K evo-bio, or genetic engineering, or nanotech, or mycellium or quantum entanglement–or something I had worked on at some point. Robert Heinlein said that specialization is for insectts and I didn’t realize just how much I had taken that to heart.
I’m interested in all of it. I’d love to learn all of it. Anyone have time to sell me?
AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing?
MF: Any way they like. In addition to my website (www.monalisafoster.com) I am on social media:
Facebook (fb.me/MonalisaFosterStoryteller)
Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/monalisa_foster_storyteller/)
Twitter (https://twitter.com/HouseDobromil)
You can also find me at the Baen website: https://www.baen.com/threading-the-needle-foster.html
They can also subscribe to my newsletter via https://monalisafoster.com/signup/analog
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