William Paul Jones discusses how a trip to the Balkans inspired his latest story, “A Garden in the Sky,” from in our [November/December issue, on sale now!]
Analog Editor: How did this story germinate? Was there a spark of inspiration, or did it come to you slowly?
William Paul Jones: “A Garden in the Sky” is, at its core, a refugee story. I was in the Balkans for a few weeks during the height of the 2015 refugee crisis, and I was fascinated by the resourcefulness and grit displayed by the displaced people as they searched for a new home. There’s this try/fail cycle hoping for safety in a new place and then moving on once a new shelter proves itself to be only temporary, and after each potential safe haven is degraded, the subsequent havens decrease in comfort and connection. It made me think, what’s the farthest that a person could go to escape war and oppression? What’s the least hospitable environment that someone would endure to give the slip to those that hate them? How would they make that new place feel like home? Venus seemed like a good place to try, and just like on Earth, a little garden can give us a taste of where we came from.
AE: Do you particularly relate to any of the characters in this story?
WPJ: So much of this story is about immediate problem-solving by a person strung out on a wire with little-to-no support. The way that Larysa breaks down her assets, liabilities, and shifting objectives as she troubleshoots her own survival definitely has a lot of me in it. I do a lot of wilderness travel, and there are so many situations where the difference between getting really hurt and being totally fine is the exact kind of calm assessment and careful action that Larysa works through. Plus, her dry sense of humor is very much my own.
AE: How much or little do current events impact your writing?
WPJ: Current events show up in my writing mainly as vibes, big picture themes in the background of a story. I don’t like to lift specific events from the modern day, but I am influenced by things like the spread of brushfire wars and the rising tide of global fascism. Strangely, I kind of predicted a major world event in “A Garden in the Sky,” as the main character is Ukrainian by birth but fled due to the rise of warlords in her homeland; I wrote this story in Jan 2021, a little over a year before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So maybe I’m subconsciously repackaging the news of the day more than I intend.
AE: Who or what are your greatest influences and inspirations?
WPJ: I was brought up on the big names from sci-fi’s golden age; Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, etc. My hard sci-fi owes a lot to them, especially in understanding how to best describe otherwise dry things like orbital mechanics and space ship design without getting bogged down. I also come from a comedy background and I love to get in the head of wry, irreverent protagonists, so if I’m getting stuck I’ll often dip into some Chuck Palahniuk or K.J. Parker to get myself into a snarky mindset. But unquestionably my biggest, earliest storytelling influence is Dungeons & Dragons; like many of us, my earliest narrative lessons came not from published fiction but from gaming. It’s a great way to learn what kinds of things you enjoy in a story and what kinds of things make you yawn around the table.
What’s the farthest that a person could go to escape war and oppression? What’s the least hospitable environment that someone would endure to give the slip to those that hate them? How would they make that new place feel like home? Venus seemed like a good place to try, and just like on Earth, a little garden can give us a taste of where we came from.
AE: How do you deal with writers’ block?
WPJ: My foolproof method is what my wife and I affectionately call a ‘Con-stick-tutional.’ I will literally just walk around the block with a stick in my hands, waving and twirling it like a baton while my mind wanders. Half an hour of that, mulling over a specific narrative question, and I’m always back on track.
AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
WPJ: My next sci-fi project is a short novel about professional football, of all things. It’s not a subject you’ll often see tackled (pun intended) in science fiction, but professional sports already feels so dystopian and mechanical at times that it feels right to give it the full treatment. I’m also most of the way through a fantasy spy novel inspired by deep-cover foreign operatives in our own Cold War.
AE: If you could choose one SFnal universe to live in, what universe would it be, and why?
WPJ: I’m going to go with the obvious answer here: Star Trek. They’ve created a fairly egalitarian, post-scarcity society, and as the man says, if you made a utopia, you would live there, right?
AE: Is this piece part of a greater universe of stories?
WPJ: I like to think that all my near-term hard sci-fi lives in the same universe, even if they don’t interact directly. It helps me stay in a similar tone and grounds me not only in the society and politics of their world, but in the direction I want the technology to take as well.
AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
WPJ: Write a lot. It doesn’t matter so much what you’re writing, just that you’re putting words on paper. There’s no substitute for consistent practice. Whenever you finish something, put it in a drawer for six months, then take it out and destroy what your past self did; that guy didn’t know what he was doing.
AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing?
WPJ: You can find my writing at williampjones.com or on X/Twitter @hwdynamo. Find more of my wilderness adventure weirdness on Instagram @awaywejones
The Astounding Analog Companion 
The story is fine, but I was very disappointed with probably a minor point for the author, but a major one for me. The protagonist, Larysa is from Odesa (spelled Odessa in the story. I understand, people still don’t care that Ukrainian locations are known to them in Russian transliteration. This hurts but let it be), Ukraine. She had not a very happy childhood here. First, she “was only two years old, and a little busy fleeing the purification squads in Odessa”. Then her grandma had to escape Ukrainian Security Service, think a FBI analog: “When the SBU came for you in the night and you had to flee.” Finally, and this is mentioned in the text above “Ukraine until the warlords”…
The author states that he write the text in 2021, before the February 2022 full-scale invasion and that he was in the Balkans (for readers with vague knowledge of Europe’s geography, Ukraine doesn’t even border a Balkan state). His presentation of Ukraine is as an oppressive state (see the SBU), supposedly with at least locally powerful Nazi groups (I guess ‘purification’ means supporters of ‘pure’ race on nation) and a failed state (warlords). All of the above are propaganda points of Russian disinformation machine and it is very disappointing to see propaganda’s echoes in Analog. Meanwhile, in the real life, Russia bombs Odesa (as well as other cities), killing civilians. And Okay, the story was written before, but the author hasn’t had time to change it for the period between the initial submission and the publication in November/December 2024?! Or the author believes in Russian statement that their ‘operation’ is to de-Nazify Ukraine?
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