Albuquerque Journal from Albuquerque, New Mexico • Page 30

1)6 ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL Friday. August 23, 198 New Mexico Opens Future to Authors Pretty, tough shoes for pretty tough kids i I Jilt i i jk-P- By Tracy Wright FRFFl With all the quality, comfort careful fit uimi that you expect from Stylish Durable! Scuff Tuff leather shoes are as scrape scuff resistant as they are flexible, lightweight good looking. In styles for boys girls. Stride Rite: So. go Scuff Tuff YJ.

1 1 II HUl ttffliL .1 A While 10 me louyn sium A Tree Watch! .1 With the purchase Suzy Charnas Stephen Donaldson of any pair of new Scuff Tuft shoes' i i 1 rjfy il laA, 1 Rfmcmbfi mil -J sl "I'm convinced there is some kind of an overlay of organized energy," she said. "The intention of the Indian dances to create harmony has carried through successfully. If you're a creative person, the harmony will start to creep in." Physical aspects of the landscape have crept into Charnas' writing, most notably in the topography of the world of "Motherlines," a novel about a tribe of nomadic women. The plains and mesas of the imaginary land had their genesis in the view of Albuquerque's West Mesa, Charnas said. In "The Vampire Tapestry" she used specific local settings such as the Santa Fe Opera and the University of New Mexico, where the starring vampire is employed as a professor of anthropology.

"The conjunction of my first entry into the supernatural and the use of this area as a setting seemed right," she said. Stephen R. Donaldson, who moved to Corrales from New Jersey in 1977, described himself as not only happier and healthier in New Mexico, but also feeling that "life has a lot more to offer." "I think some of the most 'paranoid' writers those who view life as a conspiracy against themselves or their characters live in large cities or on the East Coast," Donaldson said. "On the other had, people like Tony Hillerman and Edward Abbey, who live in the West and write about it, have an underlying sense of affirmation. The human heart has more room to breathe in a place like New Mexico, and therefore there is more reason for it to breathe," he added.

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Their ranks include Stephen R. Donaldson, Fred Saberhagen, Robert Vardeman, Suzy McKee Charnas and Walter Jon Williams. Roger Zelazny and George R.R. Martin spin their spells in Santa Fe, while Jack Williamson is still conjuring tales in Portales. They are professional writers who stay in New Mexico because they find the environment conformable and conducive to their work.

That environment works in both subtle and obvious ways upon the writers' thoughts. Williamson, for instance, might never have started writing science fiction had he not been exposed to New Mexico's frontier heritage. Williamson, now 76, came to New Mexico in a covered wagon by pioneering parents. But the frontier closed before Williamson could partake of its opportunities, forcing him to look elsewhere for new worlds. In the 1920s, he turned to the frontiers of science-fiction writing.

"Frontiers are needed," he said, "Both in the physical sense and as food for the imagination. People need to be able to get away from the closed worlds of the past." In New Mexico, echoes of pioneer history mingle with reports of research that continually establish new frontiers in science, giving local science fiction writers what Williamson called "a nice location." The state's blend of cultures offers additional input for the imagination, as did Williamson's encounter with Indian life as a student at the University of New Mexico in the 1930s. "It was the first time I came to be aware of the differences in cultures and to gain understanding and respect from them," said Williamson. "I suppose that's basic to a science fiction writer." "I'm concerned with the conflict between man and the hostilities of nature and of the need to keep from demolishing nature in the process of conquest. I'm not a dogmatic ecologist, but certainly we have to be careful of what we do with technology." New Mexico's intersecting frontiers are significant, too, for Walter Jon Williams, a member of the emerging generation of writers in the genre.

"There's the frontier of the American West, with its emphasis on exploration, pioneering and building a technological civilization in a unfriendly habitat," said Williams. "There's the cultural and ethnic frontier, with New Mexico's wildly divergent cultures, and there's the high-tech frontier." Science fiction deals with all those frontiers, he said, and with the tensions between technology and culture, between different communities, ideologies and ways of handling these themes, and handling them in a realistic and appropriate way, he said. "Part of my new book 'Hardwired' deals with the tension between a New Mexico high-tech cowboy and a half-cyborg street girl from the East," he said. New Mexico's high-tech frontier is useful to Robert Vardeman in providing a coterie of friends who enjoy speculating about the potential uses and ramifications of their scientific research. "Developments such as lasers and particle beams are the old Buck Rogers things come to life," said Vardeman.

Vardeman, who worked in the solid state physics department at Sandia Labs before turning to writing fulltime, is attuned to the area's historic and cultural resources. He traces his tendency to use the theme of humans discovering alien cities to a lifelong interest in archaeology. Roger Zelazny is another writer who finds the New Mexico scenery conducive to a flowing imagination. After spending most of his life in large cities, he visited Santa Fe 11 years ago. Zelazny's works involve a variety of settings and themes, but there is one novel directly attributable to a memorable trip to Canyon de Chelly.

"The protagonist is a Navajo and the story is set in the canyon 100 years in the future. After coming to New Mexico, I became interested in Indian culture by going to the dances Then we took the trip to Canyon de Chelly and I decided I wanted to set a story there some day. I put it all together and the result was "Eye of Cat," he said. Suzy McKee Charnas, who moved to Albuquerque from New York City in 1969, credits the centuries of Indian ceremonials with imbuing the landscape with a a harmony that encourages artistic thought. S100 SELECTED T-SHIRTS Reg.

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