Rob Shelsky
Rob Shelsky attended Southwestern College, University of Victoria, and San Diego State University. The author has lived in Australia, as well as Canada, and America, and has traveled widely elsewhere, especially to Mexico, England, and Europe. Rob has written many articles on writing, including, Medieval Hamlets, Villages, Towns, and Cities, for The Internet Review of Science Fiction, numerous articles for Alien Skin Magazine, Neometropolis, and for other publications. England's Midnight Street Magazine has his article, Brave New World--Sci-Fi as Message, in its current issue.
The short story, Implosion, came out two years ago at Alien Skin Magazine. Gateway SF Magazine published Let it be Forever. Rob placed four consecutive times in the L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future contest for 2003 and 2004. Since then the author has had numerous stories published, such as, This Narrow Isthmus--Fifth Dimension Magazine, Without Omens--Aberrant Dreams Magazine, Dance of the Butterflies--Continuum Science Fiction Magazine, amongst others. Jim Baen’s Universe Magazine has accepted Dreamtime. Dark Wisdom currently has Serpent Caravan in its final reading pool.
Lost Echoes, with Awestruck E-Books, was Rob Shelsky's first novel-length time travel romance. Miss Annabelle’s Yankee is his first short story of a time-traveling romance and now released with EaglesongBooks.com. They have also accepted Ancient Enemies. Currently, the author is a resident columnist for Alien Skin Magazine where he writes columns on how to write science fiction. He also does investigative reports on unusual places, such as the Brown Mountain Lights of North Carolina, and the Haunted Chambercombe Manor of Ilfracombe, England. Rob lives in Asheboro, North Carolina, where he is a real estate broker. He enjoys contemplating ideas for new stories while watching the sunsets over the mountains.
Aberrant Dreams: What piece of fiction literature has had the most impact on you and why?
Rob Shelsky: That’s a hard question for me to answer. I've read widely, very widely, and for years it was anything and everything I could lay my hands on. I would describe myself as a voracious reader. And there are a lot of superb writers out there, past and present, that have impacted me in many ways. In fact, this question reminds me of that scene from the old movie version of The Time Machine.
Upon finding three books were taken by the time traveler from his own library, the friend asks the housekeeper which three books she thinks her master took with him to help build a new world so far in the future. And that’s what fiction literature has done for me, help me build my own private world, but it took more than one, or even three major fiction works to do it. Practically everything I've read has helped shape my beliefs, feelings, and values.
If I had to pick just one as having the most impact on me, I'd pick the Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov. It may not be the best written series, or the deepest, but as a child it swept me up, made me see things literally on a galactic scale, and gave me a sense of the span of human history and future history, a glimpse at the scope of possibilities that could await us. That, and the fact it was one of the first pieces of science fiction I've ever read. It made me want more! But then, let’s not underestimate the value of the Mary Poppins series I read either, and its profound effect on me as well. Oh, and Peter Pan, that was important, too. What can I say? They did have an effect on me!
Aberrant Dreams: Describe your writing atmosphere.
Rob Shelsky: Ah, my writing atmosphere, again, what can I say? It’s so marvelous. I sit by a window of my private tower studio, typing, and often pausing to reflect, to watch the waves crashing on the black rocks below where my house sits on the edge of a cliff. If I glance to my left at sunset, I see the mountains purpling in the distance with the sun like a huge red ball sinking behind them. To the right of my airy perch are the distant twinkling lights of a major city.
Yeah, right! I wish! In reality, I use an old desk with an aging computer and two out-of-date printers, all situated in a tight corner of my master bedroom. I do have a couple of windows, and they look out on my front yard, which although nicely landscaped and private, certainly isn’t a match for the above idyllic setting I'd like to have! Actually, as far as writing atmosphere goes, a lot of that comes for me in the meditation stage when I’m plotting out my stories, and that is often when I’m sitting on my back porch, gazing out at Mount Shepherd and the green hills of my property. There, I have ideas (once in a blue moon) and sometimes even sort of profound ones come to me. Lots of questions about life, the universe, and such come up as well. Wish I had the answers! I don’t, so I just write about the questions.
I find it helps to sip a little wine, too, just to set the mood for thought. A lot of writers around the turn of the century had the so-called benefits of Absinthe, that "little green fairy" as an imagination booster. It worked very well, I hear, although it apparently also killed a lot of them off in the process. Oh, well, what price the muse, I suppose? I guess I’ll just stick with an occasional glass of cheap wine. And my stories may show that! Ah well, life is not easy as "they" say.
Aberrant Dreams: If they were to make a movie about your life, who would play you?
Rob Shelsky: Now you’re just being cruel. With my luck, it would be Rod Steiger as he looked in the movie version of Ray Bradbury’s, The Illustrated Man . A great actor, but not real "purdy" as we say here in the South. The persons I'd like to have portray me are Patrick Stewart, or Ian McKellen. Yeah, I know I don’t look anything like them, but hey, it’s my fantasy, okay? I'd hate to have Tom Cruise or George Clooney play me. I want someone with acting depth, soul, and substance to take the part. I may not have those attributes, but it’s a movie, right? We’re all supposed to want to look great on the silver screen and thinner too! Not easy to do on a wide screen.
How about Brad Pitt? No depth there either, but I'd be looking mighty good! But you know; this isn’t just a trivial question. While I was in England this last spring, we were delayed on a highway in the Lake District there, because a movie company was using a farmhouse along the way to film the life story of Beatrix Potter, of Peter Rabbit fame. It made me wonder how the world would view her afterwards, Beatrix Potter, I mean. They’d see her through the acting ability of a certain star, and for many, many people, that’s how they’d remember Beatrix Potter always. Fritz Lang said, he was a very "visual person," and films are just that, strictly visual. So it is such types of people as Lang that shape all of our images of historic writers, artists, musicians, and such. Like Outer Limits, They control how we view them. So we writers better hope that once in a while they do it with a touch of compassion. But who am I kidding? Just to have a movie, any movie, done about me would be way cool! Heck, I’ll even sell my autographs now, cheap, before it happens. Any takers out there? Hey, writers have to eat, too, you know!
Aberrant Dreams: The Fermi paradox states that if there is an infinite positive probability that life exists elsewhere in the universe, then why can we not detect any of it. What is your real world answer for this? What is your favorite literary speculation answering this and who wrote it?
Rob Shelsky: You’ve struck a powerful chord here, because that has always been a fundamental question for me, an overwhelming one. It has shaped much of my thinking and a great deal of my writing. On the one hand, I can’t conceive that we’re alone in the infinite sea of the universe. That seems impossible to me. However, if others are out there, why don’t we hear from them? We’re beaming out into the universe, so why aren’t they?
My real world answer for this? First, despite the vastness of the universe, I think the conditions for intelligent life are fairly rare, even if life, as such, may exist in abundance on the microbial level. But for intelligent life, it isn’t just the right planet, the right available compounds for life, the right distance from the right sun, but a host of other factors, such as the age of a sun when intelligence gains a foothold, the number of asteroid impacts a planet may suffer and when. Then there are all sorts of other things like cosmic ray bursts, does the world have a large moon to stabilize and moderate the weather enough, and a host of other conditions. For intelligence, the universe may be a very hostile place to exist, indeed. I think, perhaps, it is.
Secondly, civilization-as-we-know-it may be very temporary, so temporary they may not exist long enough for us to catch them when it comes to receiving their signals. So, we may just not be in the right place at the right time to hear them. Why are civilizations temporary? BIG QUESTION! For all the above reasons I've given, I'd guess, and perhaps because they often do manage to make some fatal error along the way and do themselves in. Make no mistake, civilizations are social organisms. They act, react, and behave much as other organisms do. And animals make mistakes, often fatal ones for themselves. Even if we negotiate the nuclear age safely, there is the biological, chemical, nano, and so many still unknown ones waiting to possibly trip us up and ultimately destroy us.
Despite all this, I think civilizations do, sometimes, make it. We did, so far. So the answer to the “Great Silence” has to do, I feel, with Frank Drake’s Equation, but not quite in the way that many people may believe. Civilizations may only exist for a very brief time, historically speaking, because it is just a transitory stage, a short way-stop on a much more magnificent road. Our sum total of knowledge is doubling, and the time that it takes continues to be halved. We’re down to just around a couple of years or less to do it now, I've heard.
So, I think we are headed for an information implosion and we will reach such an Omega Point in the very near future. Thus, my answer would be Transcendence with a capital “T.” Perhaps, we are headed for an “ultimate dim Thule,” as Poe said, one perhaps truly “out of space, out of time.” Who knows? And not to wax too theological, but the universe may be, literally, the breeding ground for some god’s children. Haven’t you noticed with living things, how they are spawned by the thousands and millions but only a few survive to go on and reproduce? It works for individual animals and entire species as well. Maybe, it works on the universal scale just the same. Maybe, even intelligence is subject to such prerequisites. Those few, who survive, get to go on to something else, something perhaps far greater than we are just beginning to imagine. The universe as test tube and crucible, as it were.
Arthur C. Clarke’s, Childhood’s End, is the story that most profoundly affected me in this regard. Also, Taylor Caldwell’s, Captains and the Kings, had a great impact on me along those lines, but for entirely different reasons. Sorry for the long answer on this one, but as I've said, it’s a big question.
Aberrant Dreams: In your opinion, what has been the greatest invention in the past 100 years?
Rob Shelsky: French Fries! Those little golden strips of potato deliciousness! The all purpose food, even in space. So are onion rings. Kidding, although, they do rank high on my personal idea of great accomplishments.
Actually, this is a tough question to answer. I mean, one could point to telephones, radio, television, cars and/or planes as tying the world together, to make civilization of today possible, and thus our explosion of knowledge. But if I had to say any one thing, I'd guess it would be the computer. It has such enormous capacity for us as a species, such capabilities to aid and help us on our way. Can you imagine our modern civilization running without computers? Think how long it would take at a bank to get answers, balances, and transfer funds, without them. Everything in the world would be that way, slow, clunky, inefficient, or just downright impossible.
And as a knowledge source, the internet is getting to the point where it out performs most libraries. Many libraries, in fact, are going online. As our sum total of human knowledge doubles and doubles again, the only way we can readily access it all, search it, organize it, and use it, is through the computer. Without the computer, I don’t think we’d have much of a future. Even with it, I sometimes wonder. Like all inventions, it’s a double-edged sword. But, as Aldous Huxley pointed out, it’s a “Brave New World.” I think it’s much better to embrace that and try to improve on it, than to deny the reality of it.
Aberrant Dreams: If you were a mythological creature, what would you be and why?
Rob Shelsky: Wow! There are so many. A centaur might be nice, but somewhat limiting, I think. Dragons are just too “old hat” for me to want to be one of those. Besides, they must suffer from terrible heartburn. I think I'd like to be a gryphon. They look so great, so magnificent, and they can fly. I love the idea of flying--not on airplanes you understand, they scare me. Rather, I'd like to fly like I do in my dreams, soaring over the countryside at night, with a “moon on my wing.” I'd like to also be powerful and fierce enough that nothing would scare me. Plus, I’m a bit of an Anglophile, so the whole gryphon thing appeals to me, being the English symbol. What can I say? I want to fly like a bird, roar like a lion, and shred things with my powerful beak! Hmm? Maybe I should be a critic. They seem to have much in common with a gryphon.
Aberrant Dreams: If you had one wish, what would it be?
Rob Shelsky: I’m presuming by this question you want me to give some answer on a grand scale, rather than something personal, like fame and glory, and all those little “accoutrements” that go with that sort of thing. Okay, I can rise to the occasion, I suppose. Seriously, what I'd like, what I'd wish for, is that humanity move beyond the Earth. This is an unsafe place, in a palpably unsafe universe. We have to spread out, to transform, to change, and to meet virtually infinities of possible conditions. Cooped up here on Earth, on the Moon, or even on Mars, just isn’t good enough. A nova could take care of that, or even a rogue planet passing through the solar system. No, we’ve got to get all the way “out there.” We’ve got to spread out in order to survive, and I’m talking even beyond this galaxy, and perhaps even this particular universe. Whether we do it in trans-dimensional spaceships, or as some transcendental creature, doesn’t matter to me. But if, as a species, we are to go on, then we have to get going and do something about it! You see, as far as I know right now, we’re the only intelligent species in the universe. Even if there are others, we’re still unique, still worth saving, still wonderful! We need to preserve that, to see where it may lead. We have such powers within us, such potentials as yet unrealized. I so badly want to see our people as having the chance to fulfill those potentials, to grasp for the very stars and beyond. I think we can do it, if we just try.
Aberrant Dreams: It is stated that many of the golden age science fiction writers predicted through their writing many things that have come to pass. Do you agree with this? If so, who do you think made the most significant prediction?
Rob Shelsky: Well, finally an easier question. Who came up with these anyway? I mean, what kind of sadistic evil person makes you spill your guts about life, god, and the universe, so that everyone can make fun of you? Oh, yeah, that would be editors doing that, bless their cold little hearts. Never mind, I was just kidding--honestly. I really love editors! No, really!
Well, yes actually, to answer the questions, I do think many golden age sci-fi writers predicted things, as well as others, and they were often quite accurate in their predictions. Let me think. I'd have to say Jules Verne was a great one for accurate prediction, although he came quite early on. Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and many others also made some accurate predictions as well. With Asimov, I think I'd have to say it was about robots. I remember my junior high science teacher in Chula Vista, California, saying you could never have a practical talking computer or robot, because it would have to be as big as a city block to house the necessary components to do it. Hah! She didn’t see the microchip coming out just a year later, and the pocket calculator and digital watch with it. I use Microsoft Word with its ability to talk-and-type, or to read back to me stories I've written to get a better feel of how they sound to a reader. And, I can have it use a male or female voice to do it! So much for my science teacher’s predictions.
Oddly, it seems to be writers who are best at predicting things. Perhaps, because unlike my science teacher and other scientists, they have not only a grounding in such fields, but still have the greater capacity for imagination and vision. We sci-fi writers always seem to be looking beyond the far horizon, focusing on something distant in space, and time. Mentally, we are literally “out there.” That may be where authors get their predictive ability, through that imagination. And sometimes, just by sheer chance, we have to get lucky.
However, there is another way, which I've often wondered about. We say there is no evidence for time travel, no visits from the future into our time, or our past that we’re aware of. But, if they did come, would they be seen, perhaps, as visionaries, predictors? Would some make their living at science fiction writing, perhaps, as a cover? What do we really know about Jules Verne? I read an article about that somewhere. Is his historical past accurate, or just a made-up identity? Was he, in reality, from the future? Far out, perhaps, but that’s what we writers do, consider the far out. And, it never hurts to question. But sometimes, I do wonder about that, if just a little.
As for the greatest visionary, that would be either Jules Verne, or Arthur C. Clarke. Mind you, I’m not saying Clarke was spiritual or anything, but his prediction about communication satellites making a “global village” certainly came through, and if anything is profound, that is. The idea of us actually now being a global village is fact, incontrovertible, unavoidable. So as a prediction, it was spot on. But it’s an ongoing process, the predictive thing. Who knows, from one year to the next, who we will ultimately consider the most accurate in this regard? Maybe, even in H. G. Wells, for The Time Machine. Who knows? Physicists are working on it.
Aberrant Dreams: What musical style do you prefer?
Rob Shelsky: I like a host of music styles: rock, jazz, classical, some country, club, and Celtic. My absolute favorites are classical and club/techno, though. Yeah, that’s a musical dichotomy, but so what? I often have asked this question of people: if you were marooned on a desert island, and could listen to only one classical composer, who would it be? For many, it narrows down to either Mozart or Beethoven, although others like such composers as Chopin, Schubert, Handel, and Hayden. But for me, I think it’s a close thing between Mozart and Beethoven. Mozart created soaring, spiritual, emotional works of a most profound nature, but Beethoven had such passion as well as these other attributes.
I have, and I’m not ashamed to admit it, wept near the end of several of Beethoven’s pieces, including but not limited to, his Ninth Symphony. Mozart is divine, as they say, but Beethoven, was immortal, at least for me. He, more than any other (although Mozart is a very close second), allows me to almost touch the face of God, whatever that may be. I often sit enthralled afterwards, that a mere person could so profoundly move me, and after so much time since they were alive. Is this a form of life after death? Again, I wonder, because when those long dead can speak to us so clearly, and make us cry, aren’t they truly still alive in a very important way?
Aberrant Dreams: You write a column for Alien Skin magazine. In your time doing so, what has been the most enjoyable articles you have written and why?
Rob Shelsky: The most enjoyable ones are the ones that were most popular with my readers, naturally! If they weren’t in the beginning for me, they were after the fact. Revising my personal history in that regard doesn’t bother me! Okay, so that’s a joke. Actually, the articles where I can help writers envision things, sort them out, put them to paper (or computer screen), are the ones I like most to do. Helping others to learn to write well (which actually, when I think about it, is a horrible hubris on my part, even to begin with), are the ones I like to do best. I’m a great one for trying to show pitfalls in all areas, such as writing skills, marketing, plot composition, etc.
My latest article at Alien Skin, on the distinct possibility of science fiction being a dying genre, is my attempt to get would-be, and existing writers, to own up to the fact that we’re losing ground with regard to readership. We’ve got to somehow do the Stephen King and Anne Rice “thing” and appeal to a broad-based audience. And yet, at the same time, we’ve got to somehow be true to ourselves. I deplore formula books, simple and asinine subject matter, but we are writers foremost. As writers, we’ve got to deal with reality and what the people want. That’s always been the case. We either write for the masses or for patrons, or starve. In any case, if we are to survive, we writers, and as all artists seem to be, are at the whim of the open marketplace. We always have been, like it or not. So my job as a columnist, as I see it, is to help and convince writers that they must appeal to the broader marketplace, and yet somehow maintain the integrity of their writing matter. Not an easy job for me to do and an even harder job for the actual writers to achieve. But, we’ve got to do it! “Publish or perish,” as they say. A cliché, no doubt, but it is still an absolute truism, unfortunately. It is one we writers have to live with, like it or not, and pun intended.
Aberrant Dreams: What can we look forward to from Rob Shelsky in the not too distant future?
Rob Shelsky: A new novel. I’m working on it now, and it is going to be “literary.” You see, I take my own advice. Literary fiction is the biggest single fiction seller, with historical fiction being very popular with publishers just now. The best selling books, and there are several of them this year, are all historical fiction, and publishers have developed a real taste for them. Genre markets are small and often growing smaller. Also, they are getting very crowded with a lot of good writers. I’ll still do genre writing (sci-fi, horror, etc.), of course, because science fiction is my first love. But I want to spread my wings a little, stretch my capabilities.
My time travel romance, Lost Echoes, comes out in December with Awestruck Books. I'd like to build on that, and this time, just write pure historical fiction. It’s not easy to do. You have to have the period well researched, and that includes every aspect of it, from clothing, homes, money, culture, geography, and politics--all of it--done well. So it is a tough, but rewarding thing to accomplish. But with stories coming out with Eaglesong Books, Jim Baen’s Universe, and of course, Aberrant Dreams Magazine, as well as (hopefully), Dark Wisdom, believe me, I’m going to keep that side of my writing going. Science fiction and dark pieces I do for fun (oddly enough). Literary stories are great. They are all about people and the past, their hopes and dreams. But science fiction, ah, there is the thing! Those are stories about people, the past, and not just their personal futures, but all of humanity’s as well. How could I ever give up writing about that? I just thank the stars that editors and publishers still allow us to do it. Let’s hope for all our sakes that it continues this way. In the final analysis, I think it’s up to us, the writers, to see to it. Because if we don’t, who will?