Sim Kern interviewed by Katy Wimhurst.
3:AM: You work as an environmental journalist as well as a fiction writer. Can you say a little about how those roles might dovetail on the one hand and diverge on the other?
Sim Kern: My journalism and fiction definitely inform each other, and they’re both ways of allowing me to express my pent-up rage of being slowly poisoned via air pollution. I started writing about the petrochemical industry in Houston because I live in the shadow of all these refineries, because I’m worried about my kids’ health, and my asthma has steadily worsened over the last ten years. As a journalist, I’ve investigated some of the worst polluters in my area and become connected to a broad coalition of activists working for environmental justice across Texas. The horror of living surrounded by the oil and gas industry features in some of my darker stories, like ‘The Propagator’ and ‘Real Sugar is Hard to Find.’ But the powerful, community-minded organizers I’ve met on this journey have also inspired some of my most optimistic fiction, like the utopian, ‘The Lost Roads.’
I definitely prefer writing fiction, because I can be hyperbolic and convey more emotion and get loosey-goosey with facts to convey a bigger truth. But I jump at the opportunity to do investigative reporting that impacts my neighborhood because it’s so tangible and has immediate, real-world impacts.
3:AM: Your fiction is speculative and inventive. It involves dystopian and utopian settings as well as fantasy worlds such as in ‘Sister, Fly or Die’, and magical realist elements like Jane’s ability to hear trees speak in ‘The Listener’. What is it about speculative forms that appeals and what do they offer you that straight realism doesn’t?
SK: For me, speculative elements are like the sugar that helps the medicine go down. I’ve always loved science fiction and fantasy, and it’s just delightful for me to work in these genres. Writing is my way of dealing with trauma—but the mind really doesn’t want to look at trauma directly! So I get around my defense mechanisms and PTSD by tricking myself with a little speculative fiction, as a treat. We’re going to unpack climate grief, but also—hang out with magical talking trees! We’re going to work through miscarriage trauma—but it’s on another planet! With lots of cool alien species! Balancing trauma with speculative elements helps me confront these difficult themes, and hopefully it makes the stories cathartic for readers as well.
3:AM: You’ve built up such interesting alternative worlds throughout the short stories in Real Sugar is Hard to Find —from the invented animals and plants of planet Coron in ‘The New Nomad’, to the respirators and VerdiCorp of ‘The Propagator’, to the domes, Guardian drones and solar-block shirts of ‘Real Sugar is Hard to Find’, to the drunken chaos witches and ARKon-9 pesticide toxin in ‘Sister, Fly or Die’ — it all seems so believable. What was the worldbuilding process like when writing this collection? Is worldbuilding something you enjoy and is it harder to do in short stories?
SK: I love worldbuilding, and that’s often the first element of a story I figure out. Inspiration strikes as a vague image of a place, aesthetic, and vibe I want to convey. Then I set about figuring out what compelling themes and characters fit within that world. The little details you mention in your question often come as I’m drafting, taking me by surprise. One notable exception was the alien life on Coron, which was a bit of a group project. For that story, I asked authors on Twitter to suggest names for alien species of flora and fauna. I got dozens of excellent suggestions and picked my favorites, as well as inventing quite a few of my own. As I peppered them in the story, I added one or two familiar, descriptive words, leaving the reader to fill in most of the details. Dandular trunks, sweetly stinking foxbends, a turam calf. Suddenly I had a lush, biodiverse alien world. And all the original tweeters are thanked in the book’s acknowledgments, of course!
3:AM: Much of your fiction tackles weighty social and environmental issues—climate change, species extinction, reproductive rights, child abuse, social divisions, gender—but this never eclipses the stories you tell which always have a very human dimension and involve close and often tender relationships. Can you say a bit about how you balance the political/polemical and narrative aspects of your fiction?
SK: I don’t find it difficult balancing the political and the personal because I see the political in everything. The vast majority of suffering and conflict in my daily life is a direct result of white supremacist capitalism. We live in a society. I cannot separate my experiences from the grief and dread that weigh me down constantly from knowing that we live in a global police state built on slavery and genocide designed to concentrate ever-more obscene amounts of wealth in the hands of a tiny, ruling elite while destroying the future habitability of life on the only planet known to support it in a vast, uncaring universe.
For me to strip my stories of that critical analysis would be difficult, artificial, and—to be honest—boring. Why bother?
3:AM: Gender and sexual orientation are regular themes in your fiction. In ‘The New Nomad’, you use the gender-neutral neopronoun ‘xe’ for people on the planet Coron; Jane in ‘The Listener’ is lesbian (perhaps bisexual) and Delia bisexual; Peter in ‘Real Sugar is Hard to Find’ is gay; the child Ettle in ‘The Lost Roads’ is referred to using the pronoun ‘they’, and in ‘The End of the Nuclear Era’ you invent a pronoun ‘e’. Can you talk a little about this aspect of your writing and why it is important to you?
SK: I’m trans and most of my friends are queer and trans, so this is one of the least ‘speculative’ elements of my stories. I use they pronouns; I have friends who use neopronouns; I’m reflecting my world. I thought the idea of using only neopronouns on Coron would be funny because cis readers would have such a hard time with it. Indeed, my dad said he could not get through that story! I hope braver readers, though, will sit with that discomfort and reflect on why it may be difficult to read a whole story—focusing on human reproduction, no less—and not be able to immediately sort the characters into one of two (or even three) gender categories.
3:AM: Some stories in Real Sugar is Hard to Find involve rebellions, whether personal or more collective, against authority in dystopian futures or fantasy worlds. In ‘The Propagator’, Marisol and Ethan defy federal law by illegally and furtively growing plants in their apartment building, using UV grow lights. In ‘Sister, Fly or Die’, Wylie and Marfglen get entangled with the Ira Magae who are trying to resist the Sower Empire. Why are you drawn to rebellion as a narrative arc in short stories?
SK: Because rebellion gives me hope! We live under a horrifically violent and oppressive carceral state, which is radically becoming Christofascist to boot. As a queer, trans, Jewish-atheist, pro-abortion, environmentalist living in Texas—are you kidding? My existence itself is, increasingly, a rebellion.
3:AM: While the earlier stories in your collection are bleaker in tone, the last story, ‘The Lost Roads’, ends with a touching, utopian, rewilded vision of humankind’s future. The last paragraph is: ‘Their lives stretched ahead, not a paved road to Armageddon, but a winding path beside a clear stream. Where the path disappeared behind a copse of blooming dogwoods, the future remained a mystery. But whatever lay beyond, these children could trust it would be beautiful and free and bursting with life.’ In an era of wars, inequality and climate change, can you say something about the importance of keeping alive visions of a better future within fiction? How realistic does one have to be in offering hope?
SK: To be honest, I got tired of living in bleak, dystopian worlds in my head and IRL. I got tired of trying to out-dystopia our contemporary moment. The world keeps catching up to the stories I write—see ‘The Propagator,’ which imagined what a flooded, post Roe V. Wade Houston would look like. That story feels more contemporary than scifi now.
I needed a break from all the awfulness. I started to realize that things may never get better in my lifetime, just worse and worse, but the fascists can’t keep me from creating a better world in my head. Writing anarchist utopian fiction is an act of rebellion. And I do think it’s one that can have a powerful real-world impact. They say it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, and for most people, that’s true. I didn’t realize how true it was for me until I read Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Solarpunk fiction sets out to disprove that idiom, to give folks a vision of a far better world, so we have a compass bearing to head towards.
I won’t live to see it, but I can at least inhabit a radically kind, just, life-sustaining world in fiction. Maybe, many generations from now, something like that world will be realized. Or maybe not. Either way, I’m glad to have gotten a break from all the awfulness, if only in my head.
3:AM: What are you working on at the moment? Any projects in the pipeline that you would like to tell our readers about?
SK: Lots! In November of this year, my YA novel Seeds for the Swarm will be published by Stelliform Press. Seeds is the first book in a trilogy that will ask—what if a group of college kids got their hands on some godlike future tech that let them dismantle the U.S. government and capitalism? And what if that was a goofy, sexy, scifi romp? You can preorder Seeds for the Swarm here.
In the fall of 2023, The Free People’s Village is coming out with Levine Querido. That one’s set in an alternate timeline, where Al Gore won the 2000 election and declared a ‘War on Climate.’ U.S. Cities have become greenwashed paradises—but only for white, wealthy people. When a queer punk band tries to save their warehouse from demolition, they wind up at the heart of a revolution centering racial justice in the fight against climate change.
Finally, the sequels to Seeds for the Swarm will be coming down the pipes. Rules for the Reckoning will be published in early 2024, and Will for the Wild probably in early 2025.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sim Kern is the author of Depart, Depart! (2020), a quiet horror novella about ghosts and hurricanes, which made the Honor List for the Otherwise Award. In August of 2022, their short story collection, Real Sugar is Hard to Find, is forthcoming with Android Press, and the first installment of their YA scifi trilogy, Seeds for the Swarm, will be published November 1st, 2022 with Stelliform Press. As a journalist, they mostly report on petrochemical polluters and drag space billionaires. Sim is one of the hosts of the Climate Fiction Book Club on YouTube and Instagram, and they tweet @sim_kern.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Katy Wimhurst’s first collection of short stories, Snapshots of the Apocalypse, is published by Fly on the Wall Press. Her fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Guardian, Writers’ Forum, Cafe Irreal, and ShooterLit. Her visual poems have appeared in magazines like 3AM, Ric Journal, Steel Incisors, AngelHouse Press and The Babel Tower. Her first book of visual poems, Fifty-One Trillion Bits, is to be published by Trickhouse Press. She is housebound with the illness M.E.
