Virtual girl

While I was researching an article on homeless people in science fiction, a woman down at Elliott Bay Books told me about Amy Thomson. Thomson's first novel, Virtual Girl, features a homeless woman robot. It won the John W. Campbell virtual girl Award in 1994 for the best new sci-fi writer. To research the book, Thomson did volunteer work at Angeline's Day Center in 1989. This was intriguing, so we scheduled Amy Thomson as our featured interview for this book issue.

Real Change: Tell me about your first book, Virtual Girl. How did a robot end up homeless, and how did you end up telling her story?

Thomson: Way back in 1984, I was in the Wallingford Taco Time, and there was this very peculiar fellow taking electrical parts from a sack and sorting them into jar lids. He looked like he lived under a bridge; he was dressed in about three layers of long johns felted together and miscellaneous other clothing. I was intrigued. I asked myself what he was doing. "He must be building a robot bag lady." So I asked virtual girl myself "Why?" and I thought, "Because he's lonely." "So if he can build a robot, why is he living on the street?" I kept asking myself questions and the idea kept growing. That started the snowball rolling down hill on a very long, strange journey that eventually became Virtual Girl.

RC: How did you start volunteering at Angeline's?

Thomson: I workshopped a very early version of the book at Clarion, a national science-fiction writer's workshop held annually at Seattle Central Community College. It got ripped up. That was good, really. I learned a valuable lesson, that I am not virtual girl my fiction; I can write a bad story and that doesn't mean I am a bad person. One of the things I was told, by J. T. Stewart [a local poet and one of the editors of Blue Heron Press, publishers of the Left Bank Books series], was that I needed to learn more about real homeless people. So I eventually volunteered at Angeline's.

RC: What did you do at Angeline's?

Virtual girl

Thomson: I read poetry. The first time any of the women said something to me was after I read Robert Frost's "Acquainted with the Night." One of the women came up and said, "Wow. That was great."

RC: What did you learn at Angeline's?

Thomson: A lot. I learned how many homeless people are invisible because they're clean and well-groomed. A homeless woman could look like your grandmother. I saw the ravages and loneliness of mental illness. I saw how much the homeless women virtual girl looked out after each other. I saw incredible acts of generosity between people who had nothing. I learned how many different ways there are into being homeless and how hard it can be to get out of poverty once you've lost everything.

One woman came into the shelter with her hair slicked down with dirt, lice visible in her hair. She sat all alone, all day; she'd flinch away if anyone tried to approach her or talk to her. But after I left I stayed in touch, I got reports of her pro-gress. She finally started talking, got help, got medication, cleaned up, got a job, got an apartment. It does happen. People do make it.

RC: One of the things that I was impressed with in Virtual Girl was the homeless mother that Maggie and Arnold meet in their travels. She is such a strong, warm, and caring mother - far different than the common stereotype of mothers who are homeless.

Thomson: I do try to create female characters that are the kind of woman I strive to be. And as a feminist, I strongly believe that our culture fails to provide much real support for parenting. One of the things I learned at Angeline's was that homeless women can be good mothers, too. Raising the next generation of human beings should be the most important work humans do. Instead, people who provide child care barely make minimum wage, when they do get paid, and full-time mothers and fathers are belittled for not having a "real" job. Given the lack of respect we have for the work of caring for our children, is it any wonder that so many of them grow up broken?

Virtual girl

RC: What do you see as the trend(s) in homelessness in today's society?

Thomson: I wish I could say it was getting better. But housing prices are increasing drastically here, the welfare safety net is frayed and rotten, there's still no real access to good, low-cost heath care, no good provision for independent living for the virtual girl mentally ill, and very little help for drug addicts. It must be a whole lot harder for the people who are stuck at the bottom of the poverty ladder now. Nobody seems to be thinking about the public health risk of having such a large number of people homeless. It's not a problem that's going to be solved by harassing them and blaming them for being poor.

I think the next serious downturn in the economy is going to come as a real shock to a lot of people who think they're doing all right now.

RC: What have you written, besides Virtual Girl?

Thomson: I have two books currently in print: The Color of Distance and Through Alien Eyes. The two books tell the story of the meeting of two cultures, one human, the other alien, and how they transform each other. I was inspired by a comment by Octavia Butler: that a novel is about how an individual changes, and a series is about how a culture changes. The aliens live in a very natural, apparently primitive state, but gradually one discovers that they have a very advanced biological technology, and that they essentially run the ecosystem. I was playing very deliberately virtual girl with the whole idea that natural equals primitive. I read a lot of anthropology, biographies and travel books, from books on the Yanomamo Indians of Brazil to The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence. And it struck me that the Yanomamo have a technology, it just isn't our technology. If you dropped Bill Gates into the Brazilian jungle, he'd be helpless. He'd have to learn from the Yanomamo how to survive there.

RC: Do you find it possible (in what you have read, or what you have written) to effectively combine social commentary or criticism with "tell me a good story"?

Thomson: Absolutely. The trick is that the story has to come first, or else it's just preaching. You have to tell the story through compelling characters that the readers care about. And those characters have to deal with the issues that you want your readers to face. The trick is making it all flow together naturally, and that requires a strong sense of balance.

Virtual girl

RC: What attracts you, as a writer, to science fiction?

Thomson: The freedom and the range of the genre. I can write about anything, from homeless robots to aliens who speak in color and pattern. But good science fiction has a very strong intellectual rigor as well. To write good science fiction means virtual girl understanding the science behind the technology you're writing about. As a writer, I have to make the science work with the characters that live in my head. For Virtual Girl, I researched artificial intelligence, robotics, and virtual reality. But I also worked at Angeline's and spent a lot of time talking to homeless women, so that I had a sense of what the world looked like from their point of view. I knew that this was a chance to get people to walk in the shoes of homeless people, and that through fiction, I could reach people who might not otherwise think about homelessness.