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Home , Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells (author)

The Class that Made It Big Leading Edge Success Stories 35, M 8 December 2011 Former Editor Chen’s Noodle Shop, Orem, UT Future Professor

Dan Wells Peter Ahlstrom Karen Ahlstrom 34, M 35, M 34, F Former Editor Former Editor First LE Webmaster Stranger Stranger Stranger

Personal Data: Brandon Sanderson is the bestselling author of the Mistborn series, and is finishing ’s Wheel of Time epic. He also teaches Engl 318R (How to Write and ) at BYU every winter semester. is the bestselling author of the trilogy. Peter Ahlstrom is Brandon’s personal assistant, and Karen is Peter’s wife. All four of them worked on Leading Edge at the same time. Special thanks to Emily Sanderson, Brandon’s wife, who watched the Ahlstrom daughters so that both Karen and Peter could attend this interview.

Social Data: The trick to getting people to do things for you in the real world is to take them out to lunch. We met together at Chen’s Noodle House, a Chinese restaurant in Orem, UT (the place was Dan Wells’ idea). There is an authentic Chinese theme in the restaurant, right down to statues, chopsticks, and Chinese ambiance music. There were other customers in the restaurant at the time (though not too many), as well as wait staff &c.

Cultural Data: “TLE” is this generation’s acronym for The Leading Edge, as it was called at that time. Quark Xpress is an older design layout program that has since been replaced in the university curriculum by Adobe InDesign. Penguin is a large, well-known publishing house. Starcraft is a popular science-fiction-themed real-time strategy game that you can play online against your friends. Connecting several computers together to play such a game via a Local Area Network is called a LAN party. Asperger’s Syndrome is a mild form of autism that only affects an individual’s social interaction skills. For more details, consult a medical dictionary. Insight is the student journal of BYU’s Honors Program; Inscape is the literary journal of BYU’s English Department. Cheers is a sitcom (I’ve never seen it). The Violent Femmes are an American alternative rock band; “Blister in the Sun” is one of their songs. An “info dump” is a term used to describe the practice of certain novice authors telling you, either directly or indirectly, the history, culture, technology, or in great detail all at once. They are usually very boring and a horrible way to begin a story. Editors hate them. Sherlock Holmes is the most famous 19th-century British detective in literature. The Nebula awards are annual awards given to science fiction stories. The Chesley Award is given annualy to the best cover illustrations in science fiction at the World Convention of Science Fiction (). Temples are the most sacred structures in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the temple in Nauvoo, IL, has special historical significance for the church. Rebuilding the historic structure was a big deal at the time (1999–2002). Warhammer is a strategy game played with little miniature models (called minis) that have to be constructed and painted by hand. As such, each player can build an army with a unique color scheme if he chooses. It is an expensive and time-consuming hobby. Locus is a sci-fi/fantasy magazine that reviews the science fiction and fantasy published each year; getting exposure in it does a lot for one’s publicity. Star Wars: Episode I is subtitled The Phantom Menace. The first release of the Star Wars prequels was a big day in nerddom, resulting in long lines of dressed-up fans waiting for the midnight showing of the picture. Christopher Paolini is the author of the Eragon series, and first became published when he was still a teenager. A “pub” is a British term for a bar, where alcoholic beverages are served. Of course, Mormons don’t drink alcohol. Diablo II was a much-anticipated PC in which the protagonist tries to kill the devil. Wizards of the Coast is a Seattle-based company that makes board games and card games. You can see the influence of their Magic: The Gathering in Dan Wells’s Leading Edge card game. A “forum” is a name for an online message board of a website. Moshe is Brandon’s editor at Tor, the biggest publisher in America. is the quintessential Mormon author of science fiction and fantasy; Tracy Hickman also publishes in these genres, though is not quite as well-known. Harry Potter, by J. K. Rowling, is possibly the best-known and best-selling fantasy series of the early 21st Century. Jimmer Fredette was the star of BYU’s 2010 to 2011 basketball season; he has since gone on to play in the NBA. Mistborn was Brandon Sanderson’s first really successful fantasy novel. Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park, and many other thrillers with a science fiction flavor.

Item: The interview was recorded on my laptop (I spent a lot of my time turning the machine towards the person who was speaking) and later transcribed, omitting filler words and sounds.

Peter: So I did go one day in 1994.

Brandon: That’s what I was referencing.

Peter: I think it was February of 94. I took a “college day.” At my high school we could take college days. We could take three days off of school and go visit a college if you were a junior or senior. I was a junior, and those were actually the only three days I missed the entire year. The only year I ever had perfect attendance. [laughter from all] And since it was college days it didn’t count as being absent. But they were doing LTUE; I mean my sister was out here, and she was at TLE, so I was like, “Oh, I want to see this place.”

Brandon: How was it different then?

Peter: Leading Edge, as far as the meeting that I went to, was the same. I’m not sure about how much they were talking around the table, but they were sitting around the table reading slush.

Dan: You didn’t have the “too many loud people” problem? How many staff members did we lose to

Brandon: Me, Alan, and

Dan: And Eric Ehlers.

Peter: Well, the thing is, Karen can probably –you were there for the issue that took a whole year, right?

Karen: I guess. I wasn’t as much on the staffing side. I was the fiction director, so paying attention to who’s reading slush and what needs to get read, and what needs to get sent back, and stuff like that.

Peter: But wasn’t it when Vanessa was in charge that she was strictly enforcing the rule of “no talking around the table,” and that people just stopped coming because it wasn’t fun enough.

Karen: I don’t remember that. There are large gaps in my memory. I was clinically depressed at the time, and times when I’m depressed, half of my life is gone from memory. It just doesn’t exist anymore. I went once before I started really going. Doug, my brother, went on his mission the year that I came to BYU, and he told me that I should go to The Leading Edge and that I should say that Doug sent me. So I went, and everybody said, “Hi,” and “OK, you’ve got a cool brother. OK.” And I was like, “OK. See ya! He says ‘hi’!” And so I didn’t really go back until he came back from his mission and I started going with him.

Dan: I got there after my mission, which would’ve been beginning of the school year of ’98. Like August of ’98. I was dating a girl before my mission whose parents were both English teachers at BYU, so we were long broken up, but I was still good friends with her mom, so I came back, and she’s like, “You should totally go do this thing!” And so my roommate and I, Ben, went like the first or second week of the semester and we were there forever. And I think all three of them [Brandon, Peter, and Karen] were already there when I got there.

Brandon: I can’t remember how I found out about it. I just came in one day and Vanessa was editor, so you [Peter] would’ve already been there, probably. But I was immediately, for whatever reason, made a production lackey. I guess they had a hole. And so, in the old Leading Edge, production was in the basement. I don’t know how it is in this new fancy place you guys have, but production was in the basement; everyone sat around a table upstairs. It was an old house.

Dan: I miss that house. That house was sad.

Brandon: Yeah. So I got moved downstairs to be production, and learned Quark Xpress and things like that from Jeremy Caballero. And didn’t get to know a lot of people upstairs because I was down there.

Dan: I actually didn’t know you very well until we were in the writing class together, and didn’t even know that you were a writer until you showed up at the writing class, and I’m like, “What’s the production guy doing in the writing class? I thought he was a production guy.”

Brandon: Yep. So. Our generation was—on the ride over here, we were talking about how it seems like there are “generations” of science fiction/fantasy enclaves at BYU, and that there’s some glump in between them. But you’ve interviewed the Class that Wouldn’t Die.

Me: Yes.

Brandon: And we have a pretty distinct enclave. And I think it was mostly solidified by a lot of us going to Dave’s class the year he taught How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy to us.

Me: Dave who?

Brandon: Dave Farland. And Wolverton. He was the second year that the class was offered. So he was the year after the Class that Wouldn’t Die, but he’s kind of in that generation, we decided. And so taking that class together, Ben, Peter, Dan and I starting a writing group together, and kind of moving at that point I moved upstairs, so I started doing more editorial . . . Good old Doug. I love Doug. He kind of vanished his last semester at Leading Edge.

[Waiter takes our orders.]

Dan: Our class, our generation, needs a cool name.

Brandon: Yeah, we do.

Dan: ‘Cause “The Class that Wouldn’t Die,”

Brandon: That’s a cool name.

Dan: if they didn’t have a cool name, no one would remember them.

Brandon: Yes, we totally need one.

Dan: No offense, Class that Wouldn’t Die. I actually know several of them and they’re very cool.

Peter: Are we like “The Class that Made It Big?”

Me: You are like the most successful ones! Well, when you think of Leading Edge alumni, the ones that are successful, the ones that are nationally-known are the three of you. Which is why this is a really cool interview.

Brandon: Well, Dave is very well-known nationally.

Me: Yes, and in company of Dave Farland.

Brandon: Ann Sowards. The editors don’t get a big lot of attention—

Dan: Nobody remembers them.

Brandon: —but Ann Sowards, as Peter was pointing out on the ride over here, was a generation before us, and she’s an editor at Ace, which is a division of Penguin, and we did end up with Stacy, who’s an editor in New York as well.

Me: She’s doing “Tau,” right?

Several: “Tu.”

Brandon: And so we can claim her.

Dan: Yeah. I came late enough that I actually missed Vanessa entirely. I didn’t even meet Vanessa until years later.

Brandon: Loreli was the editor at the time. See, I was only there for the last month or so of Vanessa.

Brandon: So culture of Leading Edge. During our era, which basically starts, I would say, during Vanessa’s editorial shift, then goes through Doug’s, and then the three of us, and then Ben. And that’s kind of the “Class that Made It Big,” if you would call it that.

Dan: I love it!

Karen: While we were there, Leading Edge and Quark were essentially the same entity.

Dan: Yes. And I kind of wonder if that’s part of the reason why our generation became so well- defined, because we were there during the time when there was not a separate science fiction club. If you were interested in science fiction enough to join a club, you joined Leading Edge. And so it had a different, I think, blend of social stuff than maybe some of the other staffs have dealt with.

Peter: Ven was the Queen of Quark—Fen Eatough—and then when she moved to Oregon, the separate group collapsed.

Brandon: We did a lot of extra-curricular activities. I mean, we often role-played together.

Dan: We actually at one point did final work putting together an issue in a language lab ‘cause it had enough computers that we could work while also playing Starcraft LAN parties. So we were there like all night long, finishing a magazine and playing Starcraft.

Peter: The CLIPS lab’s where I worked, the Computer Language Instructional Programming Software Lab.

Brandon: I was working that whole night.

Dan: I know, you were. You were in the other room working.

Brandon: I didn’t know you guys were playing Starcraft.

Dan: Well, we were playin’ Starcraft!

Brandon: It was like 3 am and I’m looking over last proofs and things.

Me: That’s awesome.

Peter: Yeah, we were having weird banding issues with the art. I think that the color space was wrong in a lot of the art. Which nowadays, I know a lot more about, but back then, I really didn’t know anything. Because I wasn’t doing the production stuff.

Me: So what are some skills and different things that you’ve learned from Leading Edge and working there?

Brandon: Interacting with other people who are interested in what I’m interested in.

Dan: Yeah.

Me: How so?

Dan: Well, the core element of that interaction, plus then the skills of that interaction. Like he said, that’s kind of how we got to know each other, that’s how we ended up starting a writing group. The writing group has a lot to do with how we eventually got published. Getting tapped into that community helped us into the careers that we have today.

Brandon: Mm-hmm.

Peter: Mm-hmm.

Karen: And just having a safe place to practice social interaction. I believe that I have borderline Asperger’s Syndrome, and just knowing how to talk to people, and how to react when people talk to me, was really not something I learned in high school. And Leading Edge was a safe place. I could go and I could have a complete breakdown on the table, and everyone would pat me on the back and say “It’s all right.” And then we could talk about something totally different and have stuff to talk about, you know?

Brandon: A part of why it was so important, though, I think is that it wasn’t just a club.

Dan: Yes.

Brandon: The fact that we shared a common goal, and that there was work skills that we were trying to learn, and all of this industry stuff, it meant that we had a reason to go other than hanging out with our friends, and mixing those two together was a recipe for great success. So, making us feel motivated to get things done, but also having a good time. You know, I would not have gone to a science fiction club. I would not have been interested. But a place that I went to read stories, learn how to be an editor, learn good storytelling techniques. And also being able to chat about those things with friends is great.

Peter: My whole career has basically been because of The Leading Edge. Back in junior high and high school, I wrote a lot, and I’m like, “I’m going to be writer when I grow up.” But once I got to The Leading Edge, I really, really fell in love with editing. I went to one semester first at BYU before I went on my mission, and I don’t remember what I was doing then as far as The Leading Edge, but yeah, that’s not relevant. [laughter from all] After I got back from my mission, I majored in linguistics, and at the beginning of my last semester, or when I had one semester left, I realized, I really don’t want to work in linguistics. But everything that I did at The Leading Edge was stuff that I’d been doing for three years and I still really liked it. And so at that point, my goal was to do publishing. But I took the class, I took Linda’s class. Her editing and publication class. And I had all that experience at The Leading Edge, so even though I was a semester away from graduating in something that I didn’t want to do anything with, I didn’t have to panic because I already was doing the English minor with an editing emphasis. I mean, now they have an actual editing minor, but they didn’t at the time.

Dan: I think it’s important to point out that all of these benefits we’re talking about from working on a publication we couldn’t have gotten at any of the other publications they had at BYU at the time. I worked on a couple of the others, Insight and Inscape, and they were very different. As Brandon said, part of what made TLE valuable was the structure that it provided. It was not just a club of interested people showing up. But part of what made that work is the lack of structure, you know? There was just enough hole, just enough of a vacuum, that we had to fill it ourselves with the social stuff, but also with our own sense of responsibility. There was nobody watching over us, breathing down our necks to make sure that we got an issue out. If we wanted to do it, we had to do it ourselves. If we wanted to do it on time, we’re the ones that decided what “on time” was. I don’t know if that’s still how it is—

Me: More or less, yeah.

Dan: —but I think that’s really important because more than anything, that, once I got out into real jobs and I worked as a corporate writer in various creative departments for about eight to nine years, those are the skills I look back on. You can learn editing and so on in a class, but learning how to set your own pace and get work done because you’re the only one who can do it, I learned that from The Leading Edge. And so, this sounds so counter-intuitive, but I think that lack of structure is part of what made it such a good experience.

Brandon: Yeah, it wasn’t a, “You’re taking this class for a semester, have this product done by the end of the semester,” it was, “We are getting together and making a magazine, and we have subscribers, and we need to be responsible to them.” It’s not for a grade, it’s for our own integrity.

Dan: Yeah. And whatever the big research magazine is that the Honors Department does, it’s either Insight or Inscape, one of the two, I did that for a semester, and it really just felt like a class, you know? Someone else was making all the decisions, and we got one paper that’d already been chosen, and all we had to do was edit it and make it good. And I learned a lot from that, but at Leading Edge we learned so much more, like “When do we want this issue to be out? If we want it to be out in March, what does that mean? When do we have to have everything else? How are we going to fill it? What are we going to fill it with? Oh no, there’s an empty page here. What are we going to put on it?” All those kind of elements that you don’t get, you don’t realize how important that is until it’s the day before your deadline and you have an empty page and you don’t know what to put on it.

Brandon: Right. Not having a professor whose job it was to say, “Oh no, I will have to do this if the kids don’t do it,” and then doing it for them, or even in good nature, feeling that the magazine was their responsibility. Not having that meant it was our responsibility, and, you know, I would hold up the magazines we made against the other magazines at BYU any day in terms of quality and production.

Dan: Absolutely.

Brandon: And beyond that, I would make a hefty bet if you were to go to either of the other ones, Insight or Inscape, during the same era, say, 1980 to 2000, and say, “How many professional editors came out of this? And how many professional writers that make their full- time living writing would you find?” and then compare it against us, and we will blow them out of the water.

Dan: Mm-hmm. Well, and when we talk about the lack of structure and the lack of that faculty supervisor making sure it all happens, I don’t want to make that sound like we’re down on our supervisor. Linda, at the time, was great. And she was always there. Anytime we had a question, she would answer it, she would help, if we couldn’t do something, she would show us how to do it, but she was never the driving force. The driving force had to come from us.

Me: You mentioned the slush room a little bit and how sometimes it was really talkative and sometimes, apparently there was a rule you guys mentioned that you couldn’t talk there? It seems like the slush room kind of has a pendulum swing going on over the generations with that.

Brandon: How is it right now for you guys?

Me: Oh, it’s a talkative place. Right now it’s the fun slush room. And I hope it stays that way for a while, because that’s what I like.

Brandon: We actually solved that problem by making a “quiet room” and a “talking room.” And those who wanted to go chat, went and chatted. We had the balcony, so during the summers we would just go out on the balcony, and if you wanted to go just read, you did that. It worked wonderfully. Solved that problem. And Alan and Eric were not allowed on the balcony. [laughter from all]

Dan: Well, and the weird side effect of that is, because we were in a little house, basically, you opened the door, and you walked down a couple weird landings, and then there was this table that’s too big for the room, and people had to crawl over it to get to the other side, and so there’d be seven or eight people kind of crammed around and draped over couches reading slush pile stories, most of which were awful, and so they were bored, and it became a very talkative environment, and I remember, so it was very threatening, I think, in a lot of ways, for newbies to show up, and I remember one in particular: This guy came in, and he opened the door and he just kind of saw everybody, and it’s like on Cheers, everybody’s like, “Norm! Hey new guy! How are you?” And then somebody said, “I say” (‘Cause they’d been singing Violent Femmes all night), so they said, “I say that we welcome the new guy by singing our favorite Violent Femmes songs.” And they start singing “Blister in the Sun,” and the guy turned around and walked out. [all laugh] And that was like the shortest staff member tenure we ever had.

Karen: But another side effect of having talking around the slush pile was you’d finish a story and be like, “Oh, man, this was terrible!” and someone would ask, “Why?” And that kind of helped. You know, you had to write a response on every sheet that you finished, but that sort of talking helped you figure out, “What am I gonna write on this sheet? What is it that bugs me so much about this story?” or “Why don’t I care at all?”

Dan: And that also helped you weed out what was purely an emotional response. If you finished a story and said, “I just hated this story!” “Why?” “Because I’m having a bad day.” And then you would just put it back and you wouldn’t ding the guy’s story just because you were pissed off that day.

Karen: And so I’d, in my time, I’ve done a lot of reading other people’s stuff and commenting on it. I’m in the writing group even though I’m not actively writing.

Others: Except you just sold a story!

Karen: I did just sell a story.

Me: Where to?

Karen: Machine of Death. So it’ll be in their volume 2. Who knows when it’s coming out. Being able to read something and tell somebody why it’s not working or what you’re really liking or even what it is you’re feeling when you’re reading is a learned skill as much as any of the others, and I’ve found it valuable in my social interactions with writers.

Dan: Well, and as a writer as well, I became A) much better at pitching stories to editors once I had read two years of slush because I knew from experience why I hated something and what bugged me about a submission, and what would bug me before I even read it. And so I learned how to not do that kind of stuff, or I learned how to do it well so that it wouldn’t bug people. And you just learned a ton about writing from looking at other people’s writing and then being forced to say why it was good or bad.

Peter: One of my favorite things that I did over there was when we published the story “Lever Handles.” It starts off as a terrible, terrible story. A huge info dump, very boring, for nine pages, and then the story starts. And so the other editors, it seemed to me, were very lukewarm on it, but I really liked the last part of the story, and so we just decided to go ahead and cut the first nine pages. Leave like the first paragraph and a half, cut out nine pages, and then have the rest. And since we were doing something that drastic to it—at the time we did all of our acceptances just by mail, we would print out an acceptance letter and a contract and just mail it to them.

Dan: This was in the olden days.

Peter: And they would send it back, but since we were gonna do something so drastic, we decided that I should call him on the phone, and say, you know, “We want to publish your story, but—”

Dan: “—only half of it.”

Peter: “—we want to take an axe to it.” And he was fine with that. I mean, once we explained the reasoning and stuff. And I think the story that we published turned out to be a good one. And learning to recognize that in writing, because that sort of thing is something that is a mistake that writers will often make. They have the back story for the character; they need to know for themselves, but they need to know when the story to tell actually begins. And it’s often a good idea to write out that back story, but then . . .

Karen: It’s often a good idea to then throw it away.

Peter: Throw it away?! Well, save it, save it in a different folder, but, you know, don’t put it on a . . .

Me: I’m working on a story that’s exactly like that right now. Same thing. Not that many pages, but almost exactly the same thing. Peter, when we were corresponding by email earlier, we mentioned there was kind of a crisis about a story that had ended up being plagiarized. [laughter from all] Could you tell us that?

Dan: I was actually just going to bring that up, because I thought that was one of the best learning experiences.

Brandon: Do we have to bring that one up?

Me: I think it needs to be recorded.

Peter: It was actually a very interesting learning experience.

Dan: First of all, it demonstrates the fact that we were playing without a net, you know? That the possibility of failure was completely real. We were not shielded from the real world in the way we had always been in high school and college classes. We were out actually dealing with real people who would try to rip us off, and rip other people off. And then when problems happened, we had to solve them. It didn’t just, you know, the semester’s over and like, “Oh, well, glad I didn’t have to deal with that.” No! We still had to deal with that. So we learned a lot of how to be careful, how to fix problems. Anyway, Peter was more involved. He can tell you more about the anecdote itself.

Peter: So we got the story. It was a long one. It was a novella. It was at least 17,000 words. Maybe it was 15. It was called “The Singular Habits of Wasps,” and it was by this guy whose cover letter said that he was in prison.

Dan: We actually got a lot of submissions from people in prison. I don’t know if you still do.

Me: Not as much.

Brandon: I didn’t think we got a lot.

Dan: Really? Maybe I’m just remembering the poetry guy. Because I loved him.

Brandon: It would happen every couple of months or so, we’d get one from someone who was in prison. They’re in prison, what else are they going to do? They’re going to sit and do something like write.

Peter: And so we read it, and it was a good story, it was a Sherlock Holmes pastiche where Jack the Ripper was actually Sherlock Holmes chasing down an alien that was implanting eggs into bodies of these women. And that’s why it was called “The Singular Habits of Wasps,” because wasps will do the same kind of things with caterpillars and what not. So it was kind of a wasp- like alien that was disguised as a human, and Sherlock Holmes was chasing this guy down.

Brandon: Peter says it was a pretty good story. It was a story. It was the best story I have ever read at Leading Edge.

Dan: Which maybe should’ve been a clue. [all laugh]

Peter: So we wanted to publish it, but the guy wrote back and said, “You know, actually, I can’t, because I’m a convicted felon, I’m not allowed to earn money while I’m in prison, and so I’ll just give you the story for free.” And we felt really bad about that, but, like, it’s an awesome story, so we’re gonna publish it. And we did. And after the issue came out, somebody read it and recognized it.

Dan: It was Marny Parkin.

Peter: OK, it was Marny.

Dan: Marny Parkin. Marny or Scott. One of the two. Scott’s the one who called me on the phone.

Peter: Pretty sure it was Marny.

Me: So what did—

Brandon: It was either Scott or Marny. Honestly, I can’t remember who it was that called me, and just said, “Hey, got bad news for you: one of the stories in Leading Edge that just came out has been plagraized.” They were former editors. “This is a fairly well-known story. It’s hard to know all stories, but it was a Nebula nominee.”

Peter: By Geoff Landis. It was nominated. It may have even won.

Dan: I don’t think it won.

Brandon: No, as I remember. Anyway, so Marny said, “I’m going to contact him. Just so you know.” Which is a very them sort of thing. Honestly, after the call I had the thought, “You’re not going to give us the chance as the official to contact him? You don’t trust us?” It’s like she kind of said it as a you know, “So you can’t sweep this under the rug, I’m going to call him.”

Me: Who is Marny at this point, in regards to Leading Edge?

Brandon: I had met her once or twice.

Dan: Past editor.

Peter: Yeah, Scott and Marny were with Leading Edge for, like, a decade. And then, I think Scott Parkin is listed as, who is it that’s listed as “Old Coot” a couple times in the old—

Dan: I think that’s Scott.

Brandon: Anyway, they were monarchs of Leading Edge for a number of years. Great people. Real good force in fandom. But by the time we took over, the generation right before us, I think, had felt their fingers, but our generation didn’t really. Like, I only vaguely knew who they were. They had let go by then. Peter knew who they were.

Peter: Just vaguely. But anyway, I did talk to Geoff Landis on the phone, and explained. I mean, he knew about it already by then, but we worked out that we would count it, basically, as a reprint of, and [buy] reprint rights, on the story, but we would pay him our maximum. We had a maximum that we would pay per story. I think it was, like, a hundred dollars.

Brandon: Yeah, somethin’ like that.

Peter: And then we would put a sticker in all the copies of the book, covering up the other guy’s name and putting a copyright at the bottom of the first page of the story in all the issues, and also changing the table of contents.

Brandon: We had to print off a lot of stickers and we stuck ‘em in there. We had to do something for all the issues that had gone out, too. I can’t remember what it was. A letter, I believe.

Dan: Well, I think TLE is on demand now, isn’t it? Print-on-demand, or you print a really small run?

Me: Kind of. What’s happening with it now is that last year, the department and the college decided to just pull all of our funding, and decided not even to bother to tell us about it. For a while, there was some real miscommunication going on; we thought we were going to get a thousand dollars a year, and I restructured the magazine to that it can run on a thousand dollars a year, and that’s only for paying contributors. Five hundred bucks an issue. And as far as print costs, the $6.95 issue price right now covers about five bucks for printing and about two bucks for shipping, so every time someone buys an issue online, and the subscription rates have been adjusted as well, it actually pays for all of that. We just need money for author costs right now. That’s where the magazine is currently.

Brandon: OK. Did the department ever give you money for the magazine to pay author costs?

Me: They gave us enough to cover [Issue] 61, which is where you guys were published, and that’s why you’re going to be getting for that one. For the next issues, though, we’re kind of on our own, and so what we’re trying to do is sell lots of back issues if we can, we got from legal that we can sell PDFs of issues, so we’re doing that. Also, we’re selling now our developmental edits. It’s become a service that, based on word count, authors can send in a story and three of four editors will take a good, good look at it and give it three or four pages of copious notes about what to do to make it better. And that’s actually brought in about 300 bucks so far this semester, so we should hopefully be able to get the 500 we need for an issue by the end of the year, and do it that way. That’s where we stand now, but of course—

Dan: See? And you would never have learned those skills on any other magazine at BYU.

Me: Never. Never ever ever. I’m going to write my own little part about that, because that’s something that my generation has to deal with, is the funding crisis.

Dan: They need to get over themselves, funding these other boring magazines that nobody reads.

Me: Exactly. [laughter in the background] And we don’t know why. But we are going to survive; we are going to live no matter what, and our generation has decreed that, and so it’ll be done.

Dan: Yay.

Peter: The other thing that I really liked doing was the anniversary issue.

Others: Mm-hmm!

Peter: Pretty much my idea, right? Wasn’t it?

Brandon: I think so. You came in and said, “Hey guys, guess what?”

Peter: We’re gonna have the twentieth anniversary; we should do something really cool and awesome. So, I mean, it’s the biggest issue ever. Still. There hasn’t been one longer than that. I mean, we got James Christiansen to do the cover.

Dan: Which he won a Chesley for.

Peter: I think Jeff lined that up. And we took the people that had been involved with the magazine in some way in the past and went to them and said, “Can we have a reprint story?” basically. So there was Michael Carr, gave us a new story, but he was the least-big of the published authors that we had. He only had one published in Fantasy and Science Fiction before that.

Brandon: You guys did something similar for the 30th Anniversary edition, didn’t you?

Me: Yeah, we came and talked to you guys! [chuckling all around] Came and published things by you! And so that actually has been the tradition. There was a twenty-fifth anniversary issue, and now this.

Peter: Well, there was something they did from the tenth, I think for the tenth anniversary issue they published some of the best stories in the previous ten years, but they had been in The Leading Edge already. Like, they had something by Dave, and something by Shayne, and I’m not sure what else, so in our age, we had something by Dave, and something by Shayne.

Brandon: And some stuff by new authors, too.

Me: Which we also had in our anniversary issue just now.

Dan: The cover, the James Christiansen cover, I think it might’ve been Jeff who set up the interview. And I remember Brandon and I and a friend of mine who was an artist (because we thought maybe he would need to speak secret artist language with him), we all went to his house, and up into his studio, and did an interview, recorded it, took notes, and then asked him if we could reprint one of his old things as the cover, and he’s like, “Sure! What do you want?” He brought out this big folder and I remember we were just like giddy little children flipping through this thing, “Oh, that one would be awesome! Can we have that one?” “Sure.” “Well, can we have that one?” “Sure.” It was awesome.

Brandon: That was great. I mean, he also showed us the paintings for the Nauvoo temple, the mural, that he was doing—

Dan: —which were up on his wall at the time—

Brandon: —and he was doing something else. Wasn’t he painting minis?

Dan: Yeah, he was painting a Warhammer army.

Brandon: Yeah. Painting a Warhammer army.

Dan: That’s kind of how it was with Wolverton’s story, too. He sent us five or six pieces of short fiction, and we just kind of read through them, and had to narrow it down to which one we liked the best. And I remember calling him, and saying, “Dave, these are great! I mean, I love your books, but your short fiction is so much better!” Which was a horrible way to say it. [laughter from Brandon] And Brandon in the background literally hit me in the head. And I then tried to salvage that by saying, “You’re just a gifted short story writer!” Blah blah blah. But it was fun.

Peter: Oh, and with that plagiarism thing, after it made Locus’s website, made their news, and after that people started going through and finding at least five other things that the guy had plagiarized.

Dan: Not with us.

Peter: Not with us, but, like, a magazine called “Celldor,” had published a few.

Dan: Had he plagiarized anything with Hadrosaur Tales? [laughter from Peter]

Peter: I don’t—you can tell that story. I don’t think so, but it was interesting that the guy didn’t change the names of the stories, but he would go through and change some words.

Dan: In our case, with “Singular Habits of Wasps,” he invented the word, “lobstrosity,” which was my favorite part of the whole story. So, I gotta give him props for that. He was very good at plagiarizing stuff!

Brandon: He was very dumb at it. Change the title at least.

Peter: Yeah.

Dan: OK, so Hadrosaur Tales. This is kind of fun. We were always polite. You would always try to be polite when you’re rejecting a story. But it’s very easy for people to take it personally, and especially when you’re sending them two or three pages of, “These are all the many, many reasons I hated your story!” It’s very easy to take it personally, and so we started to get lots of emails from people saying, “Oh, yeah? Well, this story you guys hated just got accepted. So eat that.” And over time we realized that almost all of them were for some magazine called Hadrosaur Tales, and if any time we just hated something and rejected it, Hadrosaur Tales’d pick it up a month or two later, to the point that, and I can’t remember which issue it’s in, but if you go back, one of the editorials is—I can’t remember who, I want to say it was Brandon, but it might have been somebody else on staff—

Peter: Was it the “How Not to Get Published in The Leading Edge?”

Dan: No, it was—maybe it was.

Brandon: I wrote that one.

Dan: But it was a special thank you to Hadrosaur Tales for swimming in our sloppy seconds or something like that. [laughter from all]

Peter: I don’t know if you wanna . . .

Brandon: I only remember one editorial I wrote, which was “Kill the .” I can’t remember what else I came up with.

Dan: “Kill the Elves.”

Brandon: “Kill the Elves.”

Peter: But yeah, Hadrosaur Tales, I think they may have paid in contributor copies.

Dan: Yeah.

Peter: So we considered them beneath us.

Dan: It’s rare that there’s a smaller-press magazine than we were, but Hadrosaur Tales was.

Karen: One of the things I’m most proud of of my time there, other than getting the slush pile down to manageable proportions, was getting the website up and running. I was really into web design while I was in school, and actually got a couple of jobs outside of school using those skills. And this was at the very start of the internet in ’97, ’98, and so I got us a website from the . . . I was working in computer support, so I knew who to ask, and put up our submission guidelines and email address and stuff like that that hadn’t really been even out there. And I think we put, like, the first couple paragraphs of each story up for each of the issues.

Dan: I don’t know how consistently we did it, but yeah. And like she said, this is 1997. That was back when you would say, “I want to build a website for this magazine,” and the university would say, “Why? What possible use is a website?” [all laugh] It’s hard to imagine that that used to be the case, and yet they . . . I don’t know, I don’t want to harp on this point, but Karen saw a need and went out and filled it. And that’s awesome. That’s the kind of skills that you learn.

Peter: I didn’t realize that you made the website.

Karen: I’m pretty sure I did.

Peter: ‘Cause I did the redesign. [all laugh]

Dan: So he cursed your name. Without knowing it was yours. And, now, because we’ve got both Peter and Karen here, we’ve gotta tell this. Do you still do the future date in every issue, or is that just a weird thing that we used to do?

Brandon: We inherited that from other generations. They killed of a few of those long-standing traditions.

Me: Some of those traditions, we don’t even know about them now.

Dan: So the future date is, every issue would include a future date, which just some random date that was pulled out of the air. Sometimes it would be a specific thing. I’m pretty sure one of the dates is like the day that Kahn started the Eugenics Wars in Star Trek continuity.

Brandon: So the whole thing I remember is, “This issue is brought to you by The Future Date,” like, “This episode is brought to you by the Letter A,” except it’s a science fiction magazine, so it’s brought to you by a date that hasn’t happened yet.

Dan: And we would provide no context.

Karen: It’s one sentence at the bottom of a page.

Dan: Yeah, it’s like the last page. It was a filler.

Karen: “This is brought to you by December 15th, 2014.” And that’s all.

Dan: And you have no idea why, and we never bothered explaining why, and some of them we just chose at random—there is no reason why. But one of ‘em was the marriage date that you guys had set up, or something?

Peter: Yeah, it was.

Karen: I don’t really remember.

Dan: I don’t remember what date it was exactly, but they were engaged.

Karen: I vaguely remember it doing the dates of the re-release of the Star Wars thing.

Brandon: Yes, we did that.

Karen: And after I broke off our engagement, Peter was going to propose again at the Star Wars release. Sitting in line for that.

Peter: Well . . .

Karen: Or maybe it was The Phantom Menace opening or something.

Peter: Probably. It may have been that opening.

Me: I think we should back up and give me the whole history of this, a little bit more than what I got in the email. That way we can have both sides of the story going on.

Dan: Well, Peter and Karen were engaged, and then broke it off and then got re-engaged at least once and are now married! And have two beautiful girls.

Karen: We started dating having met at The Leading Edge.

Peter: We were talking around the table, and somehow the subject of Gordon Corman books was brought up, and both Karen and I both really like Gordon Corman books, so we were like, “Oh! That’s someone who has good taste.”

Dan: No one else at the table knew who Gordon Corman was.

Brandon: I still don’t know who Gordon Corman is.

Dan: I still don’t either. That’s why Karen married Peter.

Karen: He wrote his first novel when he was like 12 or 14, a lot like Christopher Paolini.

Peter: The Canadian Paolini, but not related to fantasy at all.

Karen: And he was doing the circuit of young author events in Ohio, in the time we were in elementary school and junior high, and so that’s probably how we

Peter: Well, I’m not sure how we found out about him at all, I mean my youngest sister eventually met him at the young authors’ state championships in Columbus or Dennison University. But I had just read his books, and I just really liked his books. They did, in like seventh grade or eighth grade, one of the English classes was doing Son of Interflux, as one of their books they read and discuss. But I had started reading before that.

Dan: The salient part of the story is that that’s how they got hooked up. So anyway, one of the future dates was going to be their wedding or something, and then after it was printed, they broke up, and we were all sad that the future date didn’t work anymore.

Brandon: The other thing we did was the Quantum Duck.

Dan: Which I don’t think you still have.

Me: The Quantum Duck has been debated, whether the Quantum Duck should be resurrected. It kind of goes back and forth among the staff. Some people love him and some people hate him.

Karen: You can get a new illustration.

Brandon: Yes. He’s been illustrated a number of times.

Karen: If the illustration is the problem, get a new illustration.

Peter: I mean, the one that we used the most often was not even the first one we got illustrated. I mean, if you go back in the very early issues, there are lots of different versions of the Quantum Duck.

Dan: We just liked the kind of grizzled space bounty-hunter version of the Quantum Duck.

Peter: Though the cigar in his mouth did get removed from the original.

Dan: AWW!

Me: It’s BYU.

Dan: I know, but still. So who created the Quantum Duck? As I understand the story, the Quantum Duck came about because someone, when they were naming the science fiction club, Quark, someone asked what “quark” meant, some, you know, administrator who didn’t know science said, “What is ‘quark’?” and snarky science fiction dude said, “Well, that’s the sound a Quantum Duck makes.” So that’s where I believe the duck came from, but that might be fully legend. I have no idea. And I don’t know who any of those people were.

Peter: “Quark” is definitely the sound of the Quantum Duck, but I don’t know how it was invented.

Brandon: There was a whole fiasco while we were there of trying to get The Leading Edge sold on Amazon.

Me: We’re still trying to do that.

Brandon: Yeah, and Amazon saying, “We don’t sell periodicals.” So we like changed it to an anthology for one issue, rather than a periodical, and tried to get a ISBN.

Peter: Well, we were gonna do that for one of the issues. We were gonna have it be an anthology so it’d have an ISSN and an ISBN. And we had actually lined up an ISBN, but then we realized we would have to re-word all the contracts, because the contracts didn’t allow for that. And so we killed that idea.

Brandon: But for a while it was just going to be Leading Edge instead of The Leading Edge, or something like that.

Peter: Well, I think that has actually stuck.

Dan: It’s Leading Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy. The “the” is gone. And the reason that has changed is because Peter is a stubborn, obstinate grammarian. And it always bothered him, like horribly, that “The Leading Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy” was not a real sentence.

Peter: But it used to be, “The Leading Edge Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy”; I just thought it was too long.

Dan: Maybe it was.

Brandon: I remember you slipping that in during the whole anthology thing, too. ‘Cause you’re right, Peter had been harping on that, and he comes in and says, “And, as an anthology, it really should be named this, because the “the” is more of a magazine thing.” [Dan laughs] And we finally relented, and that’s the “the” died from Leading Edge.

Peter: But we still called it “TLE.” We always called it “TLE.”

Dan: Do you still say “TLE”?

Me: Nope. It’s just “Leading Edge” now. If it has to be abbreviated in text, it’s sometimes “LE.”

Peter: It’s the same, I mean, number of syllables, “Leading Edge,” “TLE.”

Brandon: So Peter killed the “the.” He is “the” slayer.

Peter: I am the “the” slayer.

Dan: Brandon killed elves, Peter killed “the.”

Karen: Speaking of nicknames, Doug and I, I don’t know if anybody else ever did, referred to the Humanities Publication Center, which was that Crandall house, as “the pub.” And we would joke that we were going down to the pub for an evening and thought that the pub needed more of a name, and maybe a sign, so we envisioned that it was “Hugh Manatee Pub.”

Peter: Was there a manatee on the sign?

Dan: Yes, a Manatee named “Hugh.” The Quantum Duck’s best friend.

Karen: Like, wooden sign with a Manatee routered out and then painted.

Brandon: Oh, boy. I wish someone had made that and hung it out there.

Dan: That would be awesome.

Karen: We really thought about it for a while.

Dan: You should hang that by your back door. For you office.

Me: We can still do that.

Peter: Do you still put the barcode on the back?

Me: I don’t think so.

Peter: Oh. I did the ISSN barcode.

Dan: You know, Brandon, you could do a routered wooden pub sign, Humanities Pub, for the Explorers Club.

Brandon: That’s true.

Dan: That would be awesome.

Brandon: Yes. We should. We need to do that.

Dan: OK, I’m trying to think of other weird things that we did. One thing that started from—it’s not a tradition of TLE so much as just a thing that happened—is one of the issues we were working on, we had a friend named Ethan Skarstedt, and we were handing out all these titles, and he didn’t have a title, and he said, “Well, can I be the Entertainment Director?” And we said, “There is no Entertainment Director. That doesn’t mean anything.” And he’s like, “Well, can I be it anyway?” We said, “Sure.”

Me: We have one of those.

Dan: So then he hopped on the internet and emailed Blizzard and said, “Hi. I’m the Entertainment Director for a university science fiction magazine with a national subscription and readership. I was wondering if you could send me a review copy of Diablo II.” And they’re like, “Sure!” And then it showed up in the mail, and we’re all like, “What?! You can get free stuff?!”

Me: That’s a good idea!

Dan: And so we made it; we called it “The Official Time-Waster’s Guide,” or “The Semi-annual Time Waster’s Guide” because there was one game review per issue, and we did it for three or maybe four issues, and then we all graduated, and whoever was left there—or no, it wasn’t that they weren’t carrying it on, it’s just that it got too big. I mean, you’ve got ten geeky weirdos saying, “We can get free stuff by promising reviews for it.” It blew up really fast. And so we ended up forming a website that didn’t really die until a month or so ago when we realized our code was so old and porous that any 9-year-old in Brazil could hack it.

Brandon: So we ran this website, which started basically to get free stuff. And we would write reviews, and Dan was the king of getting free stuff for a while.

Dan: Well I still do. I still do game reviews on my site; there’s still three or four companies that I’m just on their list. Wizards of the Coast sends me every board game they make.

Brandon: And see, here’s the thing: you are now famous. See, now it’s a good idea for them.

Dan: Now it’s valuable.

Brandon: Back then it was, you know.

Karen: But Peter spent a lot of time on the Time Waster’s Guide forums during the years when he didn’t live in .

Brandon: That’s how we kept in touch.

Karen: That’s how he kept in touch with his friends from The Leading Edge. I didn’t keep in touch with people from The Leading Edge, Pretty much because when I broke off the engagement I had to stop going because it was so painful for Peter every time I’d show up, and so anyway, because he kept in touch, then when he was looking for a job, trying to move back to Utah, he put on the forum, “I’m trying to move back to Utah. Looking for a job. Can everybody start giving me contacts and networking and stuff?” And it was in meetings that he set up to do that that Brandon started thinking, “Hmm. Maybe I should hire Peter.”

Brandon: Mm-hmm.

Dan: I was thinking about this on the way over here today, there is a surprisingly huge chunk of my social circle is still the same people that I hung out with every day in college at Leading Edge. You know?

Peter: That’s the only social circle I have.

Dan: Our writing group is almost all Leading Edge. The people I play games with . . .

Brandon: Yeah. That’s basically my social structure. I mean, part of that is, for me at least, these are the people who knew me before I quote-unquote “got famous,” and it’s hard to hang out with other people now because they view me very differently than these guys, who view me as, you know, that joker. But beyond that, studies have been done, like, once you make those friends, a lot of people just stay with those friends, and this is where we made our friends. It wasn’t high school for me, it was college.

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Brandon: It’s because of Leading Edge. I hadn’t been a guy who made a lot of friends in high school; it was when I came and met this crowd that eventually took off, so it’s been pretty awesome. And, I mean, if you think about it, the three of us, Peter, Dan, and I, all have jobs because of each other. Dan is the one who found the editor at Wolf Fantasy and introduced me to him, and I sold a book to him because of Dan. Years later, I pitched one of Dan’s books back to that editor, and the editor bought Dan’s book. And then, me being successful enough meant that I could hire Peter, and so we have jobs because of each other and because of The Leading Edge. I would not have found that editor without Dan.

Peter: And also, they used me as their conversation-starter at the conventions.

Dan: Uh-huh.

Peter: They would figure, “OK, these editors have been talking to wannabe writers for a long time. Let’s have them talk to a wannabe editor instead, and there will be less pressure.”

Brandon: It worked wonderfully.

Dan: It was a great ice-breaker. Once I couldn’t do that with Peter anymore, I started using a friend of mine who was a bookstore manager. Just introducing him to everyone, and I made some great contacts that way.

Me: I’m totally gonna have to do that.

Dan: Yep.

Brandon: Yep, Leading Edge got us all gainfully employed.

Dan: Gainfully unemployed.

Brandon: Yeah, gainfully unemployed.

Me: Which is better.

Peter: Well, I’m employed, so . . .

Dan: That’s true. You have an office to go to. I can work in my pajamas if I want.

Brandon (to Peter): You can work in your pajamas if you want to.

Dan: Yeah, that’s true.

Me: That’s on record now, Brandon.

Brandon: Oh, I know.

Peter: I do take my shoes off.

Dan: That’s the hedonistic lifestyle that Peter lives.

Peter: Of course, I would do that a lot at TOKYOPOP, too. [all chuckle]

Brandon: The thing about your job is you were kind of half doing it before I hired you anyway, and so really you were gainfully unemployed first doing half of what you do now.

Peter: Well, that’s how I’ve gotten both of my jobs, is volunteering doing stuff for a while, and then

Brandon: And then people saying, “Wow. This guy is really. . .”

Dan: “We should start payin’ this guy for that.”

Peter: I mean, before I worked at TOKYOPOP I did a lot of manga stuff totally for free for like two years, and then finally got a job doing it.

Dan: And it was Brandon, Peter, and I that started going to conventions together.

Brandon: Ben was there, but he doesn’t count.

Dan: Yeah, Ben.

Peter: I still have the old emails where I convinced Brandon we gotta go to World Fantasy.

Me: Maybe I should include those in this project. [all laugh]

Dan: Well, and again, you know, Leading Edge, yes, is what brought us together, but I think it’s also kind of what taught us how to talk to editors. The fact that we had to talk to editors. I mean, once we’d kind of been on the inside of this industry, however small-scale, we realized how important it was to get to know people in person. And we got much better at talking to adults and professionals because of all the stuff we had to do for the magazine.

Karen: And we had had a slush pile. We’d had a slush pile that went six to eight months. I got it down to like a year and a half, and, you know, if you’re sending something to somebody to sit in a pile that they might not get to even thinking about looking at it for a year and a half, if you can get it put on the table the first day, which we did for people we knew, or people who had somebody they knew tell us to do it, you know, some sort of “in,” then you could either get published sooner or get rejected sooner and can move on to something else.

Me: Is that the way the real world works in your experience?

Brandon: Oh yeah. That’s the way everything works.

Dan: Absolutely. David Hartwell, big editor at Tor, put it this way. He said, “If you are submitting a story without a name, it’s not going from someone who knows someone, it’s just random ‘Dear Publishing House,’ it will get read by a high school intern. If you put a name on it, it will get read by an editor. And it’ll probably get read pretty quickly.”

Brandon: Unless that editor’s Moshe. [all laugh]

Dan: Yes.

Brandon: Then it takes like two years, even if it’s, you know, me sending him KayLynn’s book, and saying, “You’ll love this.” [Dan laughs]

Me: A couple of questions, maybe a little bit off of Leading Edge, but I was talking with Dave Doering a little bit about how many Mormon authors there are in science fiction and fantasy nowadays. What do you guys think about that?

Brandon: I partially blame this whole thing. [all laugh] No, I mean the Class that Wouldn’t Die, the science fiction/fantasy culture at BYU, I don’t think it can be discounted as having a hand in this. I mean, yes, LDS people do like to read, and they do seem to like science fiction and fantasy, but having that culture, the number of people that came out of this new group, and having a big LDS science fiction writer in Orson Scott Card, that when we say, “Wow. He can do it,” him and Tracy Hickman, I think is influential as well.

Peter: And Diann Thornley moved into my ward when she was stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and while I was there, her first book came out with a local small press and then Orson Scott Card wrote a review of it in Fantasy and Science Fiction, where he lavished praise on it, and then David Hartwell picked it up at Tor, so the rest of her trilogy came out then. But I went to her writing group and she told me a lot of those things that I learned about talking to editors and going to conventions and obviously helped my parents to know, “Hey. Writing is actually something you can actually make a living doing this.” You know?

Dan: “My son is not throwing his life away in trying to be an artist.” The Mormonism, and Mormons in general, and Utah very specifically, are very monocultural. You know, if one thing gets big, then it will get really big. And so both sides of that coin are working in favor of this right now. It’s first of all, if something happens, we all dive into it, and we love to do it. And so it’s really snowballed. There’s so many writing conferences and science fiction/fantasy conventions around here, and I think that’s because it just feeds itself. There’s also the fact that growing up in a very conservative religious environment, there’s not a lot of opportunity to hang out with all the geeks. Which is why we all found Leading Edge and valued it so much. But we still had those monocultural tendencies, and so we kind of applied it to our geekiness.

Brandon: I do think science fiction and fantasy also at a low point of things were a safe counterculture for a lot of us.

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Brandon: At least that’s how I viewed it. Looking at myself, I wasn’t in Utah but I wanted to do something different from my parents; I wanted to be my own person, but I didn’t want to get it through all the nasty things that kids do, and instead I got into role-playing and fantasy novels, which my parents didn’t get at all, but it was a safe counterculture. And you mix that with the whole grand tradition of Christianity in fantasy with Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and you mix it with, you know, it didn’t take off, I think, in a lot of religious cultures because I don’t think LDS thought is as threatened by the idea of other worlds and things as some religious cultures are.

Karen: We also are better at noticing the difference between literal and symbolic, and, you know, OK, this is way out there; this is totally not real, but it can have symbolic value. And, OK, you can read this, and you don’t have to believe it to believe it.

Brandon: Yeah. You can read Harry Potter and not feel that when they’re talking about burning the witches in the Old Testament or whatever, stoning witches, that you are supporting .

Peter: Well, there are even some fundamentalists who are against the Narnia books, you know?

Brandon: Yep. C. S. Lewis is not well-regarded in a lot of American Christian culture. I didn’t realize this, but you go to the Baptists or things like this, they do not like him. They do not think highly of him.

Peter: But he gets quoted by general authorities all the time.

Dan: I think one of the biggest things is, you know, what are Mormons good at more than anything else? Mormons are good at talking about Mormons. And so, there’s probably just as many Presbyterian authors as there are Mormon authors; there’s probably just as many Catholic authors, probably more, but Mormons are really visible and newsworthy in a lot of cases, and we just like, we enjoy that spotlight. It’s the whole kind of inferiority complex that we have sometimes, you know, like, “There’s actually a published Mormon author? I didn’t think Mormons could do that!” We have this weird sense about ourselves. And so when it gets big we love to share it with everybody. We love to let everyone know, “Guess how many Mormon authors there are? And by the way, I’m Mormon. Do you want to talk to my two friends?”

Me: That’s awesome.

Dan: And so I honestly don’t think that Mormons are overrepresented. I just think that we are over-promoted.

Brandon: I’ve wondered that one myself. I don’t know how true it is. It does seem, but . . .

Dan: Utah is a surprisingly high concentration of authors.

Brandon: Well, and sales. If you look at the sales demographics, I mean, if what you were saying is true, I think it would be other regions, and if you look at it—I get the bookstand numbers every week, and Utah is disproportionately large sales for its population in science fiction and fantasy across the board.

Karen: And even if there are just as many Catholics or Presbyterians, it cannot be denied that there is a growing science fiction community among Mormons.

Dan: Absolutely. And people are finally starting to notice. We’re starting to get a lot more authors coming through for signings. Partly, I think, because people like Brandon are so visible that the publishers are noticing, and so people that would never bother stopping off in when they’re on a national book tour, and they do now because people are realizing that there’s this big, growing community here.

Me: One last question before we all go: what do you guys see as or hope for the future of Leading Edge to be?

Brandon: Don’t let it die.

Dan: Don’t kill it.

Brandon: Yeah.

Karen: Keep having a safe place for people to meet, have an excuse to keep going back to, and learning, and that is a safe place for relationships to form, whether it’s romantic relationships or networking/business/friendship relationships, keep having that safe place.

Peter: Yeah. Don’t let it die.

Dan: Well, and keep it student-run. I think the two worst things that could happen to TLE are A) it gets killed, or B) it goes corporate, so to speak.

Peter: And the people that I know from Leading Edge are pretty much still active in the church, you know? And a lot of people outside—it’s very popular among writers in science fiction and fantasy to not think very much about religion. And being in a group like that, where, like The Leading Edge, where you’re among people that liked what you liked but also have the same beliefs that you have can really help a lot.

Karen: Yeah, that you can have an intellectual conversation with other thinking people without having to defend the fact that you’re looking at it from a religious perspective helps.

Me: Anything else you guys would like to say for the record here?

Brandon: I think that whole plagiarism thing is Alan’s fault. [all laugh]

Me: Alan who?

Brandon: That’s a joke. His name is just Alan.

Me: OK.

Dan: He’d like to say, “You haven’t been the hottest girl at TLE in a long time.” [Brandon laughs, then Dan]

Brandon: We have a friend who’s very political. We started up a quote board of best quotes at Leading Edge, and abandoned it after we realized he had three quarters of them.

Dan: They were all him. And he wasn’t doing it on purpose.

Brandon: No.

Dan: He was the kind of person who could legitimately say, “Oh, you haven’t been the cutest girl at TLE in a long time” without realizing that that was an insult.

Brandon: Yeah, he was trying to make it as a compliment, because it’s implying that they were the cutest girl at Leading Edge at one point, so that’s a good thing, right?

Peter: About the Mormons liking science fiction thing, I don’t really know . . . I don’t really have evidence on my side, but my dad liked science fiction, but he grew up on a farm, not Mormon, and he was born in the forties so he had a lot of the old pulps.

Brandon: Here’s the thing. What might be telling is that I think Utah sells more books demographically across the board. I think LDS people read because of the focus on education. And so it may not be a focus on science fiction/fantasy so much as it is a focus on reading, whereupon you end up with a disproportionately large number of science fiction readers because you have a disproportionately large number of readers there.

Peter: Maybe. I mean, my experience is not Utah-based until I got to college, and like other kids in my ward really didn’t read books. Any kind of books, you know?

Brandon: Right. You’ve got to remember, though, that the population that would read in general, and so if you have one extra person reading science fiction/fantasy, in that hundred, you’ve doubled the numbers.

Dan: I think that Utah sells more books than average because nothing is open after 6 o’clock here. [all laugh]

Peter: OK, I came to BYU largely because I knew that it had The Leading Edge, and science fiction sort of stuff.

Me: So did I.

Peter: And I knew that because my sister who went before me got involved with it. And, I mean, all the kids in my family were good readers, and we were big Star Trek fans.

Dan: And on that note, can we gripe about this for a minute? This is the first year that LTUE is not going to be fully at BYU. I mean, it’s always been a BYU symposium, and the current administration is so unfavorable towards it that I believe there’s gonna be one or two events on campus and I believe that everything else is gonna be at UVU this year.

Brandon: They are going to UVU.

Dan: Yeah, that’s been confirmed now.

Peter: Have they picked a weekend? ‘Cause I looked on their website and they still haven’t updated it.

Dan: Yes, I have the actual dates for it. Dave Doering emailed me Tuesday. It’s February 9–12.

Brandon: Am I in town?

Peter: Yeah.

Brandon: I am? Oh, good. When am I in Taiwan?

Peter: January 30th through February 6th.

Dan: Oh, great. So you’re just in time.

Brandon: I’m just in time.

Me: I’ll probably see you guys there.

Dan: Awesome. So please, dear BYU administrators reading this, science fiction is not evil. Get over it.

Me: Thank you for saying that . . .

Brandon: I still hold up the idea of this publication creating so many professionals, compared to, you know, I dare you. Go look and see what Inscape’s provided. How many professionals came out of that? I mean, if you really want to educate people, it’s our community, the science fiction community, and it’s three events: The class, The Leading Edge, and the symposium together have created people who are very high-profile LDS people who still have good values. It’s stunning to me that sports stars, an LDS sports star, gets lauded so much because of all the “good they’re doing” for the Church by BYU, by the administration, everyone you know, “Look what Jimmer will achieve. Let’s ignore Orson Scott Card,” who is doing the same thing for a different community, but one you just don’t get, and so is therefore not as valuable to the administration and to the school at all. And this is, you know, our group. I don’t watch sports. I don’t care who Jimmer is. I’ve never cared who Jimmer is. Steve Young seems like a nice guy, but I don’t care about Steve Young. Orson Scott Card and Tracy Hickman, these are role models. And you’re gonna kill that by what you’re doing.

Dan: I wonder, part of it, you’re talking about sports. Back when I was in high school, doing things like college days, like Peter was talking about, there was a BYU recruiter, who took a bunch of us out to dinner, and said, “Now you can ask me any questions you want about BYU and how it’s run and what happens,” and I think we asked a couple dumb little things, and he’s like, “Really? Ask the hard questions. Ask why the football guys get huge scholarships.” And we said, “OK, why do the football guys get huge scholarships?” He said, “It’s because they pay for themselves. They bring so much notoriety and money to the university that they make themselves too valuable to possibly be ignored.”

Me: And I think the administration doesn’t get that. I was on an airplane going from Salt Lake to El Paso, and I was just talking to some random girl, not a member of the Church, and I was actually reading Mistborn, and I told her, “Oh, I’m planning on studying editing, and I want to do sci-fi and I’m at BYU,” and she said, “Oh, Brigham Young is the right place for that.” No connection to the church, no connection to BYU, but she knew that. [Dan laughs] Because of these kinds of things.

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Brandon: Oh, you shouldn’t say that, because the administration will hate that. They don’t want people to think BYU is the place for science fiction and fantasy.

Dan: Well, I hesitate to say it’s the whole administration. I kind of suspect it’s one or two key people.

Brandon: Yeah, we shouldn’t talk about the administration as a group. I think most of them are just oblivious, and there are a couple of key people are like, “No, we don’t want it.” There’s some sort of literary eliteism going on where it’s like, “We don’t want to be known as the genre fiction school,” and are worried about this.

Dan: Well, and what I keep thinking, thinking about the football player principle and things like that, the Inscape magazine, or whatever the big research one is, Insight or Inscape, I wish they had more distinctive names. The University actually mails that out. It’s like a prestige thing. Even though it may not be producing editors or writers, it is bringing the University some respect among other universities. I think the way to maybe help change the University’s attitude a little bit about TLE and the symposium is to go out of our way to give the University that notoriety. You know, bring it that kind of respect as publicly as possible, so that they end up just having to embrace it, instead of stifling it. And that would probably piss a couple guys off, and I don’t like those guys anyway.

Brandon: Whatever happened to, you know, small and simple things, and the lowly of the Earth? I mean it seems like it’s all about the prestige and not about the fact that you’ve got this community of people, and let’s face it, a lot of the science fiction/fantasy people are not terribly eloquent. They are not politicians, they are not the beautiful people that the literary magazines want to feel that they are. I’m not talking about beautiful physically, you know what I mean?

Karen: Well, at the symposium, I was looking around the room one day, and thinking, “Why does science fiction attract . . .”

Dan: “All these weridos.”

Karen: “Fans that you can look at ‘em and say, ‘Hmm! Look at all these science fiction fans!’” And I think we decided that it was probably because it doesn’t exclude them.

Brandon: Yeah.

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Brandon: Sports fans will laugh those guys out of town, and we’ll say, “Nah. You can come. Everybody’s welcome.”

Dan: Oh, but we’re just as bad.

Brandon: We can be.

Dan: We are just as bad. We make fun of Jocks, we make fun of literary elitists.”

Brandon: We make fun of literary elitists because of what they’ve done to us, mostly.

Dan: Yeah, I know.

Brandon: Most I know of our generation don’t make fun of jocks. High school, maybe, but most people I know, once you get to your twenties and things, jocks and nerds blend, because we kind of do the same things.

Dan: Yeah. You just geek about different subcultures.

Brandon: And it blends together. I do think there is a lot of resentment of, because of what’s happened here, I mean, because of things being killed and whatnot. But we certainly can be self- hating a lot, which bothers me.

Dan: I remember, you know, I’ve been going back and forth with Dave Doering almost the entire year about what was going to happen to the symposium, and at one point he said, “Richard Paul Evans. The Christmas Box guy. He’s written a science fiction now, and so we could get him.” And my first response was to laugh and say, “You realize how he’s going to get pilloried if he tries to show up at this convention because he’s not our people?” And I thought, what a stupid, jackass thought is that for me to have. You know, if he wants to be part of this culture, we should be embracing him instead of just making fun of him because he’s The Christmas Box guy. And as much as we complain about that attitude, we still kind of have it. We need to be better than that.

Brandon: Good point. The way we treat Christopher Paolini, for instance. Even Michael Crichton.

Dan: I remember at one of the early World that we went to, you mentioned Michael Crichton as a science fiction author, and half the room would go, “Oh! Michael Crichton, that jerk!”

Brandon: Something they did to Harry Potter initially.

Dan: Yeah. Harry Potter initially, you could not bring him up. That’s what we do to Stephenie Meyer.

Me: Oh yeah.

Dan: Don’t mention her at a science fiction convention, ‘cause everyone will laugh at you. And we need to be more inclusive if we want to be included.

Brandon: I need to get back to work.

Me: Thanks, everybody, for coming. This has been awesome.

Brandon: We ought to go to Leading Edge one of these weeks, just to see what is happening.

Me: Show up anytime.

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honors 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU