Theodore McCombs is a writer and environmental lawyer formerly based in Denver, now in San Diego, California. His first book, “Uranians,” was an Octavia Butler Award finalist, and one of Electric Literature’s “Must read debut short story collections of 2023.” McCombs is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Workshop and a longtime member of Colorado’s Lighthouse Writers Workshop, where he wrote and workshopped the stories in “Uranians.”
“Uranians” won the Colorado Book Award in the short stories category.
SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory. What inspired you to write it? Where did the story/theme originate?
Theodore McCombs: The stories in “Uranians” came together over a five-year period starting in 2016, when I was taking classes at Denver’s Lighthouse Writers Workshop. For a year, my Lighthouse friends and I had been running a literary blog, “Fiction Unbound,” about hybrid works straddling what you’d call “mainstream” literary realism and speculative genres like science fiction, fantasy, and horror. I was constantly reading, re-reading, and writing about these stunning books by Ursula K. Le Guin, Shirley Jackson, Kazuo Ishiguro, César Aira, Octavia Butler, Carmen Maria Machado. I was appreciating the intensity and range of what these works achieved and I thought, Why isn’t my work cutting loose like this?
In 2017, I attended the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Workshop in San Diego—the workshop that produced literary heroes of mine like Butler, Machado, Ted Chiang, and Kelly Link. The first story in the collection, “Toward a Theory of Alternative Lifestyles,” was my application to the workshop, and the next three I wrote there (then revised, and revised, and revised). Something unlocked for me there—a sense of audacity, a technical confidence to get kind of bonkers and let the story and the lines go places I’d never planned.
All of these stories take a driving theme I’d been preoccupied with, then literalize it into the speculative conceit. What if you could go out to the club and literally see a different life for yourself? What if our society’s willful blindness toward economic exploitation and climate change were technological, not just psychological? At Clarion, the pace is so intense that you reach for any image or weird twist of memory not nailed down to put in the story, so these pieces end up as little universes of associations, populated far beyond the original conceit with dreams, jokes, traumas, and bad dates.
SunLit: Place this excerpt in context. How does it fit into the book as a whole? Why did you select it?
McCombs: “Talk to Your Children about Two-Tongued Jeremy” is the fourth story in the collection, and it came to me on the 16th Street Mall Ride. I was noticing how many bus stop ads put grinning faces on inanimate objects—why anthropomorphize a Google Maps location pin? I got to thinking about why companies want to sell us on a personal relationship with their products. If it is a personal relationship, it’s a manipulative, extractive one. I’d seen sci-fi stories about human-A.I. romances, but wouldn’t the truer relationship be an emotionally abusive one?
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That was 2017, before I’d ever heard of large language model chatbots—certainly before we became generally aware of addictive social media algorithms targeting children and A.I. “hallucinations.” Well after the story was first published in “Lightspeed Magazine,” life proved all too ready to imitate this dystopia I’d imagined almost as a gag. At least the story has a happy-ish ending, and I think it has some real value to add to the A.I. conversation.
SunLit: Tell us about creating this book. What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write? And once you did begin to write, did the work take you in any unexpected directions?
McCombs: Each story surprised me. The title novella, “Uranians,” started as a “flash” story—1,000 words, tops. All I had was the image of a long-haul space voyage and a life-extending drug delivered to the expedition members in tattoos that broke down chemically over decades, so that the forms of Earth faded as the ship passed further and further from Earth.
I had no idea it would become this 30,000-word space opera tying together all the previous stories’ themes around a grand metaphor for the outsider experience. It forced me to confront my most profound anxieties as a queer man—What do I think my place in nature is? What do I think my value is? Do I have value, or am I this arbitrary accident—is looking for meaning in it all a trap?
I love how the heartlessness and silence of space make science fiction writers ask such stark questions. And I was pleased to discover I had an answer. I couldn’t have expected it would involve actual opera!
SunLit: Are there lessons you take away from each experience of writing a book? And if so, what did the process of writing this book add to your knowledge and understanding of your craft and/or the subject matter?
McCombs: The collection’s first story poses a question about the meaning of being marginalized that the final novella answers, and I’ve felt invigorated by that ever since. There’s this idea that literary fiction has to embrace irresolution, ambiguity, because that’s real life and real art. And I’m all for probing the very real complexities and ambiguities of the human condition, but there’s something exciting about fiction that gets to a thesis. Not argumentatively, but as if the characters moving through their plots were a kind of algebra that produces, unexpectedly, a new thought.
SunLit: What were the biggest challenges you faced in writing this book?
McCombs: Oh, not much—I just had to overcome the demons I’d been carrying with me for decades. The writer Robin Black has wondered if every writer carries an experience of voicelessness in their early life: that insistence that no one wants to hear from you, that you have nothing worth saying and no one’s listening.
In my life, that overlapped with the public homophobia of the ’90s and early aughts: Those gays shouldn’t “shove it in our faces,” need to tone it down, etc. What came out of that experience was a layer of protective inauthenticity, a way of saying what I thought people would respond well to instead of what I really thought, and that layer was crucial to break through. “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,” as Kafka put it; for me, that was a matter of writing the book.
SunLit: If you could pick just one thing – a theme, lesson, emotion or realization — that readers would take from this book, what would that be?
McCombs: Coming to understand one’s self and one’s relation to the larger world isn’t about “identity politics,” “virtue signaling,” or any of the other contemptuous labels used to dissuade us from thinking critically about integrity and justice. To confront the real evils of the moment, we have to understand where we’re getting our ideas from, how they shape our decisions, which ones we carry forward and which ones we need to jettison.
SunLit: In a highly politicized atmosphere where books, and people’s access to them, has become increasingly contentious, what would you add to the conversation about books, libraries and generally the availability of literature in the public sphere?
McCombs: On the bright side, if it were true that creative writing and the humanities were a pointless indulgence, you wouldn’t see such a passionate campaign targeted at access to books, right? One of the truths this campaign understands all too well is the enormous impact access to books can have on LGBTQ youth.
Queer characters’ existence in stories—especially YA stories—undermines the narratives of impossibility that keep us in the closet as kids, that convince us to stay isolated and false because we must be the only weirdos stuck with this unhappy, dead-end condition. But if you can read about an LGBTQ person having friends, adventures, even a love story, that helps us break out of those narratives. The campaign to cut off access to queer- and queer-inclusive stories is an effort to reinforce the frameworks that keep us from realizing ourselves, and it will fail, but it will keep a lot of children hurting in the meantime, as it’s meant to.
SunLit: Walk us through your writing process: Where and how do you write?
“Uranians”
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McCombs: I almost only write in the mornings, now. I work full-time as an environmental lawyer, and it doesn’t leave much mental juice for the afternoon and evening shifts. I’ll carry a notebook and flash cards to scribble down ideas throughout the day, and on some evenings I can do an hour or two of revisions.
But if it’s drafting, I’ll always leave that for the first thing in the morning, immediately after I wake. Coffee, no breakfast, no phone, just writing at my desk for an hour or 90 minutes, until I have to start work. My telework schedule, which started during the pandemic, has been a godsend in that respect.
On the weekend, I can go two or three hours, but I’ve found there’s not much point in continuing to write past the third hour. It’s all longhand in a series of spiral notebooks. My partner is a ballet dancer, so when I’ve had a good morning, we use his Theragun on my writing arm.
SunLit: Do you have anything nice to say about A.I.?
McCombs: I think A.I. in science fiction is too often either a cold, homicidal supervillain or a stand-in for “human, just different.” What I tried to create in “Two-Tongued Jeremy” is a voice that isn’t “sentient,” isn’t a “person,” but whose sinister quality comes from his familiarity, not his alienness.
If A.I. is malignant, it’s because it reflects the malignant systems behind its code. That’s true in the story, and it’s true in our world: I don’t think we’d see nearly the same problems with Large Language Models we do now but for our profiteering tech companies, our broader disrespect for public commons like the internet, and the low value our culture places on art and the written word.
SunLit: Tell us about your next project.
McCombs: It’s a pseudo- or neo-Gothic novel, set in a medieval monastery—we follow a boy taken from his family and “oblated” to the Church, but it’s a very different Church. For one thing, everyone’s praying in math equations.
It’s another story about coming to decide your place in an unjust world, but it builds off “Uranians” in thinking about queer separatism, cycles of violence and retribution, empire, climate change, faith, and yeah, some fun math stuff. It’s based off a story I wrote for “Beneath Ceaseless Skies,” which almost was in this collection, but we saw how big and ambitious the story was getting and decided to let it become its own book. I’m extremely excited about it.
Just a few more quick questions
SunLit: Do you look forward to the actual work of writing or is it a chore that you dread but must do to achieve good things?
McCombs: Sorry to the haters, but I love it. It’s never a chore, although it’s usually hard. I do get a kind of stage fright before writing a big scene, but that’s just to tell me it’s worth doing well.
SunLit: What’s the first piece of writing – at any age – that you remember being proud of?
McCombs: When I was seven or so, I wrote a Nativity play; the script was maybe four, five pages? The angel Gabriel keeps mugging for the audience and wondering why everyone’s talking like Shakespeare. That was pretty funny.
SunLit: When you look back at your early professional writing, how do you feel about it? Impressed? Embarrassed? Satisfied? Wish you could have a do-over?
McCombs: I don’t look back much at my past publications because they’re not really mine anymore—if it’s in the world, it’s the world’s. There’s only one story I’ve published that I physically can’t bring myself to read again, and it’s not that it’s bad, it’s just that I took a lot of revisions from an editor who wasn’t right for the story, and I should have just pulled the story.
SunLit: What three writers, from any era, can you imagine having over for a great discussion about literature and writing? And why?
McCombs: I know Proust and Joyce met one night at a dinner party; it was awful, neither had read the other’s work, both were complaining about their stomachs. I think Picasso and Stravinsky were there too? I would have liked to have been there, brought Jane Austen with me, and sat her next to Igor and listened to them gossip savagely about the unfolding debacle.
SunLit: Do you have a favorite quote about writing?
McCombs: There is a quote from Guiseppe Verdi that haunts and inspires me, but it’s more the story: Soon after Verdi’s first big break, he lost both his young children to illness, and then his wife too, in the span of one year, while he was on commission to write a new opera for La Scala. And the commission was for a comedy. Can you imagine?
Of course it was a flop, the worst flop of his life. He sat with the orchestra and watched all of Milan whistling and jeering at him from the boxes, this promising 26-year-old who’d just lost his entire family. For the rest of his career, he nurtured a fanatical contempt for audiences—“I accept their whistles,” he said, “on the condition that I am asked to give nothing for their applause.”
I like to think I have a less hostile stance toward readers by the time I do the book tour, but it’s the necessary headspace to write from. All that matters is the work itself.
SunLit: What does the current collection of books on your home shelves tell visitors about you?
McCombs: A visitor might conclude that eight authors—Austen, Aira, Butler, Kafka, Ishiguro, Elena Ferrante, Hilary Mantel, and Jorge Luis Borges—have a peculiar hold on me because for those eight authors only, I own five or more volumes by them. That’s true enough, although Borges and Aira write very short books. A visitor also might conclude that I can read fluent French, which is not true. But the day I do, I won’t need a new volume of “Notre-Dame des Fleurs,” will I?
SunLit: Soundtrack or silence? What’s the audio background that helps you write?
McCombs: Silence for drafting, soundtrack for revisions. I hate to be so on brand, but I love working to medieval and Renaissance music. Motets and madrigals, Palestrina Masses—throw me a tambor and shawm and I’m in the zone.
SunLit: What event, and at what age, convinced you that you wanted to be a writer?
McCombs: It wasn’t until I was 27 and got an idea for a novel that I’d say I had conviction. I’d worked hard on and even published some short pieces, but I still treated it like a hobby. Then I stumbled on a subject so good, I had to give it everything I could. I spent the next 10 years on it, which convinced me.
SunLit: What’s your greatest fear as a writer?
McCombs: When I’m writing, I’m anxious about incoherence—Does this make any sense? Does this work at all? Is this going to fall apart like an old rattletrap carriage? But I’ve learned to be comfortable in that incoherence because it’s the only way I can get to something surprising and exciting on the other side.
SunLit: Greatest satisfaction?
McCombs: Connecting to new readers. It’s wonderful seeing positive things said about “Uranians,” but every so often, there’s a reader who connects profoundly with the book and writes an essay or blog post that shows just how deep they dove into the work, and how far down it goes. That’s incredible: to realize you’ve allowed a stranger to build an entire underwater cave network of meaning in a slim hardback volume.