Vajra Chandrasekera is a writer based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Between writing mind-boggling stories like The Dreaded Name, which we’ve reprinted in this issue for your reading pleasure, and editing a plethora of stories for Strange Horizons, he has amassed quite the years of experience under his belt. And during lockdown, a time when many of us were unable and unsure of what to do with ourselves, he managed to do the unthinkable: write a book!
“I wrote it in 2020, so during the pandemic—this is basically what I did when the lockdown first hit. I just sat down and I was going completely mad, so I was like, okay, I need to not go completely mad, so I’m going to write a book.” He says half laughing, half serious. At the time of this interview in mid-July, he has just turned in the final edits of his first novel, The Saint of Bright Doors , slated for release in 2023. When we ask what it is about, he says it is fundamentally a geopolitical family drama, about being the unchosen one—all “very South Asian” themes. Confused, we ask if it has any speculative elements in it, and he chuckles and clarifies that it’s fantasy! “It has magical doors […] all kinds of things, there’s a lot going on, I threw the kitchen sink at it.” Yes, we asked about the cover and it has been finalized, and no, Chandrasekera is not at liberty to divulge any further details about it. What he did divulge was his shock at publishing schedules, “I’m so used to short fiction schedules that this is really weird for me. I’m used to selling a story and most of the time, seeing it published the next month or something, or maybe a few months later. But then I sold this book and they were like, ‘okay in about eighteen months’ ” He breaks into a chuckle, and adds on retrospectively that the upside for him is that it gives him time so he doesn’t feel pressured for edits.
Chandrasekera’s love for writing was fostered early on at home. His father was an author in the 70’s, a time when a publishing industry didn’t really exist in Sri Lanka: “there were small presses and printers and whatnot, so it was kind of a self-publishing,” he says, explaining that “my father’s approach back then was that he would write, proofread, and print his books himself in collaboration with a print shop, and then try to sell it in bulk to the National Library Services Board.” The first book his father published was the same year he was born, so he grew up watching his whole family being recruited to help; his mother was the editor, his brother did the covers, and when Chandrasekera himself was around eleven, he was recruited to be the proofreader, eventually learning manual typesetting at an early age. But beyond the work, he was encouraged to pursue literature because his father “was the kind of person who believed everyone should be writers—that was the natural order of things.”
Growing up reading works by the likes of Issac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke M. John Harrison, and Michael Moorcock, his journey into Science Fiction & Fantasy (SF&F) felt natural. It was a genre that had always appealed to him because of the sense of freedom it had in comparison to “a rigid literary fiction which felt constrained, where you had to write about specific things, which isn’t entirely true […] but that’s what it felt like especially as a young writer.” He takes a moment to think before pointing out that the feeling that SF&F offers is “a sense of freedom that you have to learn to respond to, ‘cause too much freedom is also bad,” he says laughingly, “constraints are useful for writers, everyone knows that.”
Interestingly, it wasn’t until 2011 that he returned to writing after a seven-year break—after work and adult life forced him to leave writing on the back-burner. That’s when he began writing “with the intent to publish,” as he put it, and while he acknowledges that it was “a privilege to be encouraged as a child” to write, he feels that his childhood wasn’t necessarily super useful in terms of developing his craft. “I still had to re-learn everything I knew about technique from scratch […] It’s really a question of practice. One thing I found much easier as an adult is that you can improve a lot faster if you actually send stuff out and get rejections and acceptances and feedback or whatever and interact with the outside world in some way. It’s definitely more helpful than just writing for yourself.”
But how does one end up writing something as intricate as “The Dreaded Name”? From the format to the philosophical concepts present in the piece, the story is memorable on more than one level. Inspired by the concept of Roko’s Basilisk and rewritten from scratch with the online format in mind, Chandrasekera wanted to utilize the format of footnotes to give the reader a different path – to experiment how the format can be exploited to hide information in the annotations. “What are all the possible elaborations and variations of this idea? And how can I present them all very quickly without writing a whole book about it? Hence the annotation structure; it’s a way of iterating through all the ideas that contesting and critiquing each other.”
Chandrasekera’s work has an uncanny quality of playing with genre in a surreal way, subverting it so effortlessly. But is this effortlessness a conscious effort? “Yes, I think about genre, but as a tool to play with at various degrees. You can play with style or the world, stylistically experimental but conventional world settings or vice versa.” He makes it sound simple, but we think of the times we, at Tasavvur, have come across stories that have left us with mixed emotions—stories that have excellent imagination but poor prose or vice versa. He believes this is a false dichotomy, “you can’t have confident prose without imagination. If prose doesn’t evoke or capture imagination, it’s not excellent,” adding that while ideas are common, execution is everything. “Art is a combination of craft and imagination.”
The Dreaded Name was one of the rare times when Chandrasekera rewrote a piece from scratch. Following Ray Bradbury’s advice, he never rewrites except on editorial order, “but he does edit!” However, he is quick to point out that the to-rewrite-or-not debate is more of a technical one than a philosophical one: “I wrote my first shore stories, when I was a kid, by hand or on a typewriter, so drafting is very tedious and painful. You make a first draft, you make edits, then you go back and type it again and do a clean copy. On word processors, that isn’t how we write anymore, it hasn’t been like that for the last twenty, thirty years. A lot of writing advice from before the nineties is going to talk about multiple drafts, because multiple drafts were unavoidable. You had no option but to write in multiple drafts. Whereas, the way we write now is very fluid, we can edit as we write.” For his own process, he usually writes a first draft, puts it aside, and goes over it for changes (but no structural changes). Hearing this felt both astounding—is it possible for writers to ever be happy with their stories?—and very validating: sometimes you just have a story in you that you want to bring into the world and set free. But we still had to ask, if he doesn’t make major changes to a piece, then how does he start a piece? With an outline in mind? He says he just has an idea in his head and goes from there. “I find that the process of writing down bullet points or a list of to do kind of kills it for me, so I avoid that. I tend to start knowing a beginning and an ending. I have those two things in mind, and the vibe or the atmosphere […] and for the rest of it I just follow my nose, and it generally works out ‘cause I know where I’m heading.” Although he does clarify that he always does a few passes on a piece before he begins submitting it anywhere because “you can always come back and improve things.”
At the time of this interview, Sri Lanka is in a state of civil unrest, which understandably has caused this conversation to be scheduled and rescheduled. Add to that an unhappy internet connection that keeps interrupting us, you’d think our conversation would be cut short. And yet, we somehow manage to have a nearly two-hour long conversation, during which craft takes center stage, morphing from one shape to another. From Chandrasekera’s sensibilities as an editor, to how he has seen South Asian speculative fiction emerge and the consequent politics of that rise, to the metamorphosis that every writer goes through. The common thread we find through all those discussions is Chandrasekera’s own attitude towards craft. Primarily, he has none. He is practical and straight-forward in his approach, there are no airs put on of what a writer should and shouldn’t do, generous in understanding the sensibilities of writers. Some people can’t read other people’s work while writing, he loves to read brilliant work, having read M. John Harrison, Lois McMaster Bujold, Alan Garner, amongst others while he worked on his novel, but should he read not-so-great work, he “wonders what is the point of writing.” While some people can’t listen to music while writing, he loves to listen to music, but can’t stand to listen to podcasts while writing. He understands that finding one’s space to write is “more of a mental space than a physical one.”
We wonder if this sensibility towards writers is influenced by the work he has done as an editor at Strange Horizons. “It’s helpful to be a writer-editor because when someone pushes back on something it’s easier to tell that this path is important to you for some reason […] you can acknowledge a writer is arbitrary—like a writer will choose to die on the weirdest of hills.” Going on to mention how he has fought tooth and nail over a comma once.
The collaborative nature of an editing team is one that Chandrasekera finds intriguing: “Everything is collaborative by design, so different people and different perspectives come into play. Sometimes you really love something and you can’t persuade the others to buy it and it’s heartbreaking, or sometimes they really love something and you hate it and you really don’t want to publish it,” breaking into a chuckle, he regains composure to add on, “but it’s helpful too! Sometimes you get a story and you think ‘this is almost perfect, but there’s something wrong with it and I don’t understand it or how to fix it,’ and then someone else says, ‘oh no I get! I can fix that’ and it’s really helpful cause […] sometimes you just need the right person to understand how to approach a story.” But what he finds most interesting is the nature of the work, “it is so interesting because there’s no money involved like book publishing, which is an industry. Short fiction is purely for the love, so if you argue about a story, you are absolutely arguing purely about the art of it.” Adding that the lack of profit-motive gives them more freedom to choose work they believe in, and that consequently helps to shape the field, agreeing that giving a structure for writers isn’t just giving a platform but also giving them a standard to aim for.
While he has been an editor for a solid six years, Chandrasekera has been with Strange Horizons in some form almost from their inception, starting out as a reader, then publishing with them, and eventually making the difficult decision to become an editor with them. “I had a think about it because I was having a great time publishing stories in Strange Horizons, but if I became the editor I couldn’t sell them stories anymore, which would take away a fairly major market from me,” he candidly points out, “but the experience of being an editor was too interesting to forgo, so I was like fine, I’ll do it.” He feels that the writer-editor combination has been incredibly rewarding for him as a writer, “because you get to work with other people and see how different other writers are from you, how very, very differently other people work. But at the same time, it gets a lot easier to spot problems, cause you get so used to it. You read thousands of submissions and you’re like okay, I can take a hint, I’ve seen the same problem three hundred times, and now I can see when I’m doing it. You don’t have to beat me over the head with it, like I get it, I get it!” We all break into a laugh. “Being an editor is an education in and of itself.”
Something we noticed about Chandrasekera during this interview was how he is very adamant on not picking favorites of any kind (at least as an editor). When asked to pick some favorite stories from his time as editor, he is quick to point out that doing so is unfair “when you’ve worked with over a hundred writers. I only picked them because I really loved them.” When asked if he has a preference for the type of stories he likes to see, he swiftly shoots down the question because he knows if he specifies a thing then he’s going to see five thousand submissions of that specific thing. So he simply advises writers to send good stories, wherever they may submit. And because he believes writers shouldn’t be worrying about what magazines are publishing. “There’s nothing as wonderful as finding a story and being charmed by it.” He points out. When he remembers that this sort of vague advice frustrated him as a young writer and will probably frustrate some of the writers reading this article, he tries to articulate his thoughts further: Be the writer you want to be, and read the writers who help you approach your work like you would like to, especially if they don’t write like you. “Don’t learn the market; you just have to learn how to write stories, and you can’t do that if you don’t read stories, if you don’t enjoy them.”
But how does one enjoy reading stories when one can’t see themselves in them? While the lack of representation in the publishing industry is often swept under the rug or even misconstrued and falsely represented by some mainstream writers, Chandrasekera is well aware of how the lopsidedness of publishing makes us think we can’t have our stories. “Have you noticed how so many young brown writers sit down and write a short story and their characters are like Bob and Sam and they’re in New York City. It’s pernicious but it happens so often! […] And I ask them why, why is it Bob and Sam in New York City, and they’re like ‘I don’t know, it seems weird to have these people doing stuff here.’ […] People grow up thinking you can’t actually have stories about people like us?” He breaks into a chuckle at the thought. “It’s bizarre but understandable, because of that long history of erasure.” One example he offers of that lopsidedness and erasure in publishing is the 2021 Sturgeon Awards nominations, which featured both Sameem Siddiqui and him — the first time in the award’s thirty-odd year run that South Asian authors have been nominated. “There’s no one for thirty years, and then two come along at once, it’s very South Asian,” he jests.
Being a South Asian writer—someone who is very much the Other in a field that is dominated by the West—means there is a burden to carry, but he feels that the burden can be better carried and navigated if writers were to learn about orientalism and exoticization, and don’t let themselves fall prey to the trap of authenticity. “We can’t ever be unconscious of the erasure, or the issue of orientalism or representation, but at the same time I think it’s incredibly important to not try and represent… to not try and be authentic, because when we try to be authentic we are inevitably inauthentic, right? We’re trying to be something other than what we are because we think we’re not authentic enough, we’re the Westernized, alienated ones or we’re too counter-cultural or too weird […] because we’re writing in English, or whatever, it’s all nonsense anyways. All of this is equally authentic as anything else, so we should be able to write whatever the hell we want, and that is the only representation that should matter. We should not feel obliged to put jasmine, tamarind, and elephants in it […] I might still put jasmine, tamarind, and elephants in it [the story] anyway because I like those things, but you shouldn’t have to.” He clarifies that it’s equally fine for South Asian writers to write about Sam and Bob in New York if they want to, not because they feel obliged to because they perceive it as “the only real way to get published or that’s the only real kind of story there is.” Staring up as though thoughtfully picking each word and expression from the ceiling or sky, before his video freezes and he disconnects. When he reconnects, without missing a beat he adds on: “Even if we don’t exoticize ourselves, there is a risk that publishers will do it for us, in how the work is presented and marketed. So it’s important to try and understand the way these dynamics work, because otherwise you can’t even try to correct it. As for representation, it’s important to have but also risky to allow it to subsume your work. It’s better to have the representation be yourself, authentically inauthentic, rather than something you have to force.”
As we near the two hour mark on the interview, we save the best question for last: how has he seen South Asian speculative fiction develop over the last ten years and where does he see it going in the next ten years? Ever practical, he asks, “this question comes up ‘cause something is happening; is it our time?” He indicates how the advent of the internet and the presence of online magazines has made it possible for South Asian writers to send their work across borders; once, manuscripts had to be physically mailed and postage was expensive. He also points out how there are more South Asian authors for South Asian writers to read now, in comparison to ten to twenty years ago, naming Samit Basu and Saad Hossain amongst others. “Things are a lot more open now. […] There’s lots of shared knowledge. So we’re absolutely going to see more South Asian writers in the next ten years.”