Mary O'Keefe talks to Cherry Wilder Cherry Wilder's story The Dancing Floor was featured in Gardner Dozois's Best New SF anthology for 1998. It tells of an elderly woman, Dr Taya Schwartz, "a specialist in alien artefacts", who is sent with a team of archivists to investigate a new example of the vast artificial pavements that had inexplicably appeared in obscure areas of the solar system. As the mystery of the "Dancing Floors" unfolds the author explores the themes of prejudice, tolerance and love between different kinds of people, from diverse cultural and political views, to more fundamental differences - humans, aliens and sentient androids. Against the background of an intriguing mystery tale set in space, there is a most human plea for acceptance and tolerance of the unusual. The central character, Dr Schwartz, is herself the product of such tolerance. She was reared on Torin, the only human child among friendly aliens. (Torin is a world visited by Wilder in an early series of novels). When we discussed The Dancing Floor it was obvious that Cherry Wilder was intensely moved by talking about this story. I asked if she identified with the protagonist. "Yes, as an older person who had been in this curious situation. There's this link with Taya Schwartz.. She's the only one - the child born on Torin. I suppose that goes back to all those Maori schools where I was the only one - the only white kid.. Going to school with Maori children I was never bullied They were the best kids. I always came last in any sport though!" She is a native of New Zealand, born in Auckland on 3 September 1930. I asked about her family and why she had attended, primarily, Maori schools "That's where my parents were teaching. And I do have Maori blood. My mother was a descendant of an Anglo-Irishman and a Maori . I take after my father's family. My mother was tall and dark." How far back does your kiwi ancestry go? "Manning (the Irishman) was my great-great grandfather. They had originally emigrated to Tasmania. "I come from a family of roughly speaking school teachers and professional people. My father was Alan Lockett from Gisborne . His father was a dentist, practically the only dentist in Gisborne and everybody had to be very nice to him. He quarrelled with my father when he was about to go to university and my father went away and became a drover on a sheep station because he liked to ride horses. And there he met the village school teacher - my mother. They married and had me. I am an only child. Therefore I decided this was never going to be repeated and I had two girls later on. "I started to write during the depression. My parents were often parted. Between one visit and the next I became conscious of what was going on. When I was between two and three my father came to visit. I had in my mind a picture of my grandfather - a man in uniform with a bushy beard but no, this was a handsome young man and he said, 'I've got a little poetry book for you.' It was a book by A.A. Milne and it set the tone of the whole relationship. He wouldn't give me When We Were Very Young. He gave his nearly-three daughter Now We Are Six. So writing and reading were highly praised and wanted in my family! "I started selling little things to magazines, little puzzles and so on when I was quite a kid In 1941 I won second prize in Christmas competition in the Auckland Herald for a Santa Claus story. Ten shillings! Goodness me that was a lot! It was a Santa Claus story and I was bound to get back to fantasy." Did you find that you were writing fantasy right from the beginning? "No I wrote many, many straight stories. I think the idea of 'write what you know', which is often put forward - that is a put-down. It means girls do not write romances. As Stephen King has pointed out, what people tend to write is copies of what they read. And so I wrote historical novels in many an exercise book. By the time I went to High School as a boarder in Nelson I was often publishing verse and essays and things of that sort and doing regular editing work for the school magazine." What writers particularly influenced you? "Classics like HG Wells and Jules Verne. Popular historical novelists like Georgette Heyer and classic mysteries like Sherlock Holmes and the works of Ngaio Marsh and Shakespeare (whom I knew well!) I've always liked the work of Kurt Vonnegut and Ursula Le Guin. Some of the classic "newer" ones - Stanislav Lem and the Strugatsky brothers, Michael Moorcock, Andre Norton, Marion Zimmer Bradley (who was a friend of mine and stayed with me in Germany) "As a young person I read everything - Proust, Freud - you name it. I read lots of popular novels too, Huxley, Wells - classics. I always liked science fiction. I wrote a lot of poetry. I remember submitting poetry to the famous and still going strong Landfall Magazine and getting a classic put-down from the editor. I was nineteen year old student and asked him politely if he might say something about the poems and he sent them back and said 'All I can say about your poems is that they did not particularly move me'. So I sent them to a little magazine and they were published and I was asked to contribute to the poetry Year Book. "Then I went to University in Christchurch Canterbury College and I had the luck to graduate in 1952 and therefore I got a New Zealand degree - BA NZ - which was rather nice. We used to say that was at least as good as failed BA Alhallabad University! My BA was in English. I did office work after that but did not settle to a particular career. Was it considered an unusual thing for a woman at that time to want to write science fiction? "Not particularly. And I had no calling to write only science fiction. I went to Australia in 1952 and I wrote newspaper reviews and stories for little magazines I published stories in women's magazines, and I respect the genre which is very specialised, but I found it more fun to write for men's magazines, albeit under a pseudonym, You got to write about fun things like bush rangers. By then I probably was thinking about being a professional writer. I married a philosophy lecturer Sandy Anderson in 1953 or 54 went to live in his home in Sydney where he was the professor of philosophy." When did you start edging towards science fiction and fantasy? Not for quite a long time. I took up teaching and separated from my first husband. In 1960 I married Horst Grimm, a German living in Australia and we had two daughters in '63 and '65 . I had had a good reaction to a science fiction story called The Ark of James Carlisle. The science fiction people were all very welcoming and nice in Australia and England and the United States. A well known literary agent, Virginia Kidd, asked to represent me, so I said yes. I had always been conscious of the fact that English Literature handled genre writing very well. This was the literature in which Henry James could write a fan letter to H G Wells and people just treated it as a form of literature. This seemed to me a good thing. When inflation got a bit bad in Australia Horst and I and the girls returned to his home in West Germany in 1976. Where was that first story published? "First in New Writings in SF number 24, in England, edited by Ken Bulmer. I had sold it under a male pseudonym but I ripped off the mask and I chose the name Cherry Wilder. It was their first story by a woman. That was in about 1974. The Wilder part of Cherry Wilder was from Thornton Wilder who I admired and a character in the TV series the Power Game played by Patrick Whymark, Sir John Wilder." What was your first novel? "The trilogy of the marsupial people, the Torin trilogy. I was inspired by Arthur Koestler. He said you could have a marsupial wolf or a marsupial sloth -a koala bear - but not a marsupial person. It had something to do with the limbic system of the brain. So I thought, yeah, Arthur, but what about on another planet? So I eventually worked them out as well as I possibly could with some interesting results. The first book was called The Luck of Brin's Five (1977) ." Finding (with some difficulty) a copy of this book after our interview, I was once again struck by Wilder's concentration on difference and the acceptance of difference; in this world the effect of a lone human who crash-lands among the marsupial inhabitants of Torin and becomes the "luck" of one of their family groups, a position normally given to the disabled or otherwise different members of the community. The next series of novels was set in an alternative Europe, the Hylor trilogy starting with A Princess of the Chameln. Magic, although present, did not seem particularly important. "Magic is kind of institutionalised I'm very low on things like dragons and unicorns." So what was the kernel of that series? "It's hard to say. I think it was the adventures of a related set of people. In the Princess of the Chameln it was about wars of conquest and the things she had to go through before she wins through to become the queen. The middle book is about Yorath who is a giant warrior, from a race of giants who aren't much good for anything other than soldiering. ["Yorath the Wolf" Another of Wilder's humane outsider characters] I mean what do you do with a seven-foot person? It's his adventures and how he gets used by unscrupulous rulers. There is an ongoing villain, Rosmer the magician. It examines the various nation states and the part religion plays. I've had a lot of fan letters from young lads who like Yorath but I say that the bit I like best is when he throws away his sword. And says 'I will fight no more.' I am of a pacifist nature although I have described more battles than I've had hot dinners!" Next I asked about the science fiction novel Second Nature. What was that about? "The humans in Second Nature are not a colony but castaways. They had managed to find this habitable planet when their craft was deflected by a black hole on an ordinary journey to colonise a planet. They had managed to survive there because it was very friendly in some areas to human habitation. They met other species there including a race of dolphins who were intelligent and could be communicated with. They met particularly a race of shape changers who come from outer space and pass among the people as human beings. One of their main projects is to provide a messiah. After about two hundred years have passed another space ship arrives They are working towards a meeting of the new arrivals with the people who are already there. Are they going to be surprised when they find there are already people on the planet! There is a sequel Signs of Life published in 94 or 95." Have you had any novels published since then? "I spent two years writing a sequel to the Hylor books called The Wanderer. I was asked to make it of block-buster length. But it didn't please Tor as a blockbuster and the final payment was withheld. I became very bloody minded. It was a crushing blow. My story was far too structured . There is great pressure on editors to produce money-making easy stuff. We'll just see what happens… "I've also done a couple of shorter novels and a sort of horror novel set in West Germany." Do you have any particular novels or short stories that mean a lot to you? "I love them all but I would still like to get published one called The Demon Codex which has a real demon and deals with the relationship of three writers and one of the themes of the piece is how good it is to love the book of a friend and how seldom it happens! The other on I should like to see published is a about possible curse on a provincial production of Peter Pan. It was real production that happened. Lots of things went wrong - rather too often! It's called Crocodile Tears." How do you usually begin a story? "I often begin with a character. The next thing is usually the end of the story." Would your first idea be the central character or a peripheral one that you happen to see suddenly? "Usually, but not always, the central character. "I was reading a Kurt Vonnegut the other day. He mentioned that some writers write the whole thing straight off as if inspired, others research and go slowly ahead. The inspired people were often women and the researchers often men .Well, I'm a researcher. I think the most important thing in writing a novel is the characterisation." If this is indeed the case, then her research is well hidden. What comes across to me, on re-reading her short stories, is the clarity of her prose and the superb visual imagery, and, most particularly, the humane and compassionate views that seem to be the backbone of the stories.   Cherry Wilder (Grimm) died on March 14th 2002 at 10am after a two year battle with cancer. She was 71. An obituary by her friend Lyn McConchie appears in #24 of Scheherazade