Edmund R. Schubert is the fiction editor of Orson Scott Card’s journal InterGalactic Medicine Show, and the executive editor of the regional business magazine North Carolina Career Network. His short stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Futures Mystery Anthology, Writers Post Journal, Pindeldyboz, Lynx Eye, From the Asylum, The Mechanized Muse, and Hardboiled Mystery Magazine, among others. He is also the recipient of a preliminary nomination for an Edgar Award for Best Short Story, granted by the Mystery Writers’ Association of America, winner of First Prize in Lynx Eye’s 8th Annual Captivating Beginnings Contest, and recipient of a Notable Stories award, granted by storySouth in 2004. Visit Edmund’s website.

In 2006, you became the fiction editor for Orson Scott Card’s speculative fiction magazine, Intergalactic Medicine Show. Tell us about the magazine and how you got this job. Do you work with Card directly?

Intergalactic Medicine Show is a quarterly on-line magazine that publishes both science fiction and fantasy. There is also an anthology forthcoming from Tor (a New York publisher that specializes in SF) by the same title that collects stories from the first two years of IGMS. The antho is co-edited by myself and Orson Scott Card. I do work with him directly, but in all honesty 98% of it is by phone and e-mail, often through his personal assistant who also serves as the magazine’s managing editor.

The funny thing is that I don’t think I could tell you exactly why I got this job. I had taken a week-long workshop taught by OSC, sold him a short story about a year later, and happen to live in the same city he does (Greensboro, NC). And I was already editor of North Carolina Career Network, which I know he had seen before.

I suppose all that worked in my favor, but the short version of the day I was offered the job is still kind of an odd one. I had sent him a copy of the contract I got from the original publisher who expressed interest in my novel (more on that later), and he called me to discuss it. When we finished that conversation he started asking me a bunch of—seemingly—unrelated questions. Before all was said and done he asked me if I would be interested in editing his magazine. Of course I said yes.

I still haven’t worked up the nerve to ask him why me, though — I’m afraid if he thinks about it too much he’ll come to his senses and change his mind.

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What is an intergalactic medicine show?

The concept of a medicine show is intended to conjure images of the traveling medicine shows of the old west, where the man on the wagon claims his product can perform miracles. And even if the townspeople know his product is a fake, even if they know he’s lying and are determined not to believe him, they can’t bear to miss the show. Well ours is an ‘intergalactic’ medicine show, where the tales are even taller, even wilder, spanning everything from the stars to the dark corners of our own minds. Plus, it’s a whole lot of fun.

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You have a blog called Sideshow Freaks. What is the focus of your blog? Is it directly related to Intergalactic Medicine Show?

Sideshow Freaks is primarily about writing and editing. Occasionally I get into personal stuff – in June I bicycled a couple hundred miles on the Skyline Drive and Blue Ridge Parkway (in Virginia) and posted a few pictures – but I avoid political rants and that sort of thing; I think there are too many water-cooler politicians on the web as it is. I started Sideshow Freaks shortly after being hired to edit IGMS and though I know the readers of that magazine are the main audience, I talk about general writing and editing issues, including things that are happening with the other magazine I edit and things related to my own writing.

One of my favorite things I do on Sideshow Freaks is when a new issue of IGMS comes out I invite all the authors in that issue to write an essay about the creation of their story. I even talked Tor into letting me include an essay from each author in next year’s anthology. I have always been fascinated by the story behind the stories and in all honesty collecting those essays is, as much as anything else, simply me satisfying own insatiable curiosity regarding the inner workings of the minds of other writers.

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I’m not familiar with many speculative fiction writers or publications. Which writers and magazines would you recommend?

Science fiction themes and tropes are creeping more and more into contemporary literary works - for instance Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife – so you’re probably better acquainted with science fiction than you realize, even if you’re not familiar with specific authors or publications.

The problem here is that many authors go out of their way to avoid being labeled as “speculative fiction” writers because SF writers are frequently dumped into a literary ghetto and dismissed as not being “serious authors.” Part of that is because – unfortunately – some SF fans have taken things like Star Trek so seriously that you would be right to question some of their choices and priorities. On the other hand, part of the reason SF isn’t taken seriously is because a lot of people aren’t comfortable dealing with issues that push boundaries. And for better or for worse, SF is a boundary-pushing genre. Too often people’s reaction is to denigrate that which they don’t understand rather than acknowledging that it makes them uncomfortable.

That’s not to say that some of the SF being published isn’t crap – some of it is – but it pains me when people use that as an excuse to dismiss the entire genre. There’s a lot of crap being published under the genre headings of mysteries or thrillers or literary fiction, too. It’s the nature of the industry as a whole.

Getting back to your original question about who or what I would recommend people read, (acknowledging the obvious bias in such a statement), I actually would recommend IGMS for the reason that the stories being selected there are being selected by an editor (me) who doesn’t live and breathe SF to the exclusion of everything else. I read and write mysteries, I read a ton of non-fiction, and I am a huge fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck. So my taste when I’m selecting stories is, I think, broader than many people might expect.

Personal biases aside, for short stories I would recommend starting with a themed-anthology; that way you know you are interested in the general topic. For instance, I have a fascination with post-apocalyptic stories, so I pick up anthologies filled with stories about that topic. I also have a penchant for alternative histories – stories built around a what-if theme — and there are plenty of anthologies with those kinds of stories.

There are also many excellent novels that spring from historical what-if questions and I think such novels would be very approachable to the average reader because they start from a point that people are already familiar with and extrapolate from there. What if the South had won the Civil War (The Guns of The South by Harry Turtledove, and A Rebel In Time by Harry Harrison); what if the Cuban Missile Crisis had turned into a limited nuclear war (Resurrection Day by Brendan Dubois); what if the Soviets had gotten to the moon first (Ascent by Jed Mercurio), what if the Nazis had won World War II (The Man In The High Castle by Philip K. Dick and Fatherland by Robert Harris). Any of those novels would be excellent choices, even if you’re not a history buff, because they (like all excellent novels) focus on the characters in the situation rather than the situation itself.

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In November, you attended the World Fantasy conference held in Austin, Texas. Forgive me for saying so, but I have this weird idea that it would be like a Trekkie convention, full of fanatics and people dressed up. Then again, I have no idea what a Trekkie convention is, or if I even spelled that right! So set me straight! What goes on at a World Fantasy convention?

There are actually a lot of different kinds of science fiction and fantasy conventions, and thankfully the days of Trekkie conventions are long gone. Most conventions today have three basic ‘tracks’ – a ‘media’ track that focuses on movies and TV shows, a ‘gaming’ track where people get together to play a lot of different games (I have to admit I know little about this track), and the ‘literary’ or ‘writing’ track, which features panels and workshops about writing and story-related matters as well as author readings. There are even some conventions that are literary conventions, devoted entirely to discussing SF novels and short stories.

If you want to see a lot of people in outrageous costumes, go to DragonCon in Atlanta, GA. It’s like Halloween for grown-ups and draws as many as 25,000 people each year. People dress up as not just Star Trek and Star Wars characters, but as pirates and cowboys and superheroes. Any character from any movie ever made is fair game.

World Fantasy, on the other hand, is a lot smaller and a lot more subdued, and is actually known as the best of the professional networking conventions. Ninety percent of the people attending World Fantasy are authors, agents, editors or publishers. It costs $150 just to walk in the front door, so you don’t get a lot of people dressed up as Captain Kirk. There are readings, panels and workshops, but as much as anything else you simply have a lot of professionals in the SF world having lunch or drinks or what have you and talking shop.

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You recently sold your novel, “The Legend of Dreaming Creek,” to a small publisher in Canada after your first publisher went under. Fill us in on your adventures in dealing with small presses, and tell us what your novel is about.

Let me start with the easy half of that question. “The Legend of Dreaming Creek” is primarily a mystery/suspense novel, but with a twist. I describe it as an episode of the TV show Cold Case with a Twilight Zone moment as the crucible forcing much of the action.

The back-of-the-book summary goes like this (it took a loooong time to boil it down to two paragraphs; I don’t think I could describe it any more succinctly):

High school teacher Danny Wakeman has spent sixteen years incorrectly believing that his childhood friend, Marcus Gaines, saved his life after an accident. But Danny’s perspective on the world gets turned inside-out when he and the woman he wants to marry, Sara McBride, drink from the mystical waters of Dreaming Creek, trade bodies and get stuck that way.

Trapped in each others’ bodies, struggling to fit in to each others’ lives, Danny and Sara will have to pull together to overcome a perplexing lawsuit, a plot to defraud Danny out of his recently deceased parent’s farm, and an attempted rape—all of which ultimately prove to bear Marcus’s sinister fingerprints. And before it’s over, Danny will discover that this pattern of treachery and violence goes all the way back to his supposed accident, which Marcus designed to cover up an even blacker secret.

The story of my adventures with small publishers is a longer one, though I’ll try to keep it brief. I started out trying to sell the novel in NY (who doesn’t want to be published by a NY publisher). Finally, after about six months of getting nowhere, I got a phone call from an agent I had queried. She said that she thought I had a good, well-written novel, but because it crossed several genre lines – having elements of mystery/suspense, romance, and paranormal/SF – it would be nearly impossible to sell in New York. She said the marketing people wouldn’t know what to do with it, so they just wouldn’t try. She suggested I would be better off going with a small publisher who would be more willing to try something “outside of the box.”

I already had a good relationship with one small press (I’ll respectfully decline to say which one, since that venture ended tragically), so I took my novel to them. They said yes almost immediately (in publisher time, which is a lot like football time – anybody who watches football can tell you that five minutes of “football” can take twenty real minutes).

I signed a contract that I was very happy with, a much more generous contract than any I would have ever gotten from NY, and was feeling pretty good about the whole thing. Around the beginning of 2007, though, I got an e-mail from the publisher saying they were having some financial problems. Ironically it wasn’t because they weren’t selling books, but rather because they had spent a lot of money printing books to fill orders, only their distributor wasn’t paying them the money that was due. (This is actually the second small publisher I’ve seen this happen to.) By chance I happened to have a connection with the distributor and tried to do what I could to help, but in the end the publisher had to cancel all their contracts.

At that point I had been editing IGMS long enough to have developed contacts in the industry and began trying to use them to find a home for “LoTDC”. As the old saying goes, so much of success depends on who you know… But the more I talked with people about publishing my novel in NY, the less convinced I became that it was the right thing to do (with this particular novel) even if I could get a contract.

That’s when, out of the blue, I got an e-mail from a small publisher in Canada saying that they had acquired all the outstanding contracts from my original publisher and were prepared to execute them. It seemed like divine intervention, so I seized the moment and said yes.

All this happened in the last week or so, and the last thing I heard from the publisher was that she was going to meet with her editor-in-chief and her publicist to talk about scheduling and such on June 29th, then get back to me the following week. I’m typing this on June 29th, so I still don’t have a lot of info. If nothing else I’ve learned not to count my chickens before they hatch, so right now I’m just trying to be patient.

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You plan on starting a second novel soon. Can you give us any hints as to what it will be about?

I wrote the first hundred or so pages of this novel (tentatively titled “After The Legends Die”) last year, but after having an opportunity to talk with an editor from Penguin and another editor from Tor, I saw that I was heading down a dead-end and tossed everything I had written. I knew I needed to set it aside for a while and then start over from scratch, so I did some research for a third novel I plan to write while the second one simmered in my subconscious. I just recently got back to work on “After The Legends Die.”

The basic concept is simple. I’ve started with the Roman legend of Romulus and Remus, where twin boys are suckled by a wolf sent by Mars, the God Of War. The boys grow up, over-throw an evil king, and build their own cities. There is then a falling out between the brothers and Romulus kills Remus. His people and their city go on to become Rome and the Roman Empire.

In my novel all of that remains true, except I’ve added a few details to the legend, using the wolf and an appearance by Diana (the Goddess of the Moon and the Hunt), to make Romulus the first werewolf and to curse the followers of Remus (I call them the Rem’n) to be werewolf hunters throughout history, seeking justice for their fallen leader.

That’s the backbone supporting the story. The novel itself is set in contemporary America and the Rem’n have not seen any werewolves for several generations, nor has anyone seen or heard from the gods for thousands of years. And although their curse still remains, some of the Rem’n are questioning the validity of their history and culture. The question is: what happens to a people when they think all of their legends are dead or just plain false?

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What has been the highlight of your writing career?

Without a doubt the highlight of my career so far has to be the day Orson Scott Card called me and hired me to edit his magazine. I know a lot of people outside of science fiction and fantasy aren’t familiar with him, but you have to understand that within the genre, saying his name is like saying Stephen King to horror fans or Tom Clancy to people who love thrillers. Add in the fact that he is paying me good money to do something I love and no other day comes close. Yet…

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In college, you put out an underground newspaper. What did the paper cover?

Back in my college days I tended to do a lot of things at 2 a.m. that wouldn’t make sense in the light of day, and that underground newspaper was one of them. What started out as a one-time lark, however, grew into something more. I started alone, but before long had six or eight other folks helping me. I’d say half the paper was filled with goofy stuff we made up just to entertain ourselves, and the other half was designed to either lampoon or protest something that was happening on campus. It was very satisfying to walk around campus and see several hundred students reading my paper.

As much fun as that was, though, there came a day where I felt like I had really achieved something noteworthy. I was in a bar playing pool with a friend and these two girls – girls I had never met before - walked into the bar talking about how interesting they had found the lecture they just left. My buddy asked them what it had been about, and they said the professor had lectured about this underground newspaper that had recently appeared on campus and what kind of people might be behind it. I thought, Cool, I’m being studied in a college class! These girls were using a lot of psycho-babble terms, so I asked them if this was a psychology class. They said Yes, abnormal psychology. I was being studied in a class about abnormal psychology! Even better!

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In addition to writing, editing, and publishing, you’ve also interviewed several writers. Who were they? How do you approach the interviewing process?

I do interviews in one of two ways: either I do them the way you (Kelly) have been doing them - via e-mail - in which case I do a lot of research, put together a list of questions, and send them off; or I do them in person. If I do them in person I still do a lot of research first, but I generally tend to sit back and let the person I’m interviewing lead the way. I find that once you get people started, they’ll talk about a whole lot more interesting topics than any I might try to guide them toward.

As for who I interview, that largely depends on who I’m interviewing them for. For the current issue of IGMS, I interviewed Peter S. Beagle, a renowned fantasy writer; for the website The Horror Library, I interviewed Stephen Mark Rainey, a horror writer who also edited a classic horror magazine for 10 years; and for the business magazine I edit, I interviewed P.T. Deutermann, a writer of thrillers and mysteries. Interviewing people can be a lot of fun, but doing it well can also be a lot of work. I try my darndest to do it well.

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What’s on your current screensaver?

I have a digital camera that I take everywhere, and when my computer goes into screensaver mode it automatically starts a random slideshow of pictures I’ve taken. We’ve been fortunate enough (my wife and I) to visit a number of places in Europe in the past few years, and sometimes I purposely let my computer lapse into screen saver mode just to watch images from Rome, Tuscany, southern Italy, London, Germany, Holland, and my kids in the back yard.