Carolyn Ives Gilman was born and grew up in Minneapolis-St. Paul. “I virtually grew up in a museum,” she says on her website. Her mother worked in a museum (and later founded the Green Party of Minnesota), and her father “trained to be a physicist, but never got his degree. In the 1950s and ’60s he worked on cosmic ray experiments and outer space balloons.” From age twelve to nineteen, Carolyn Ives Gilman organized and operated a theatrical company (which excluded adults), and at age sixteen she wrote an operetta based on Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn.

Gilman had a slightly different experience with the educational system: “I despised formal education so much I left as soon as I could. Macalester College in St. Paul mailed me a diploma in English, but I had already escaped. I later realized what I had missed and tried to make up for it by taking classes. But I acquired most of my professional knowledge through apprenticeship.” She eventually moved to Washington, DC to work at the Smithsonian, focusing on “exhibit development at the National Museum of the American Indian.”

In terms of writing, Gilman attended Clarion West as well as a Writers of the Future workshop; later, she went to the Sycamore Hill retreat. “What has had the most impact for me is belonging to critique groups wherever I have lived. I’ve been in groups with people like Kij Johnson, Ann Leckie, Catherine Asaro, and John Hemry (aka Jack Campbell). They all influenced me.”

Carolyn Ives Gilman’s career as a published author began with “The Trial of Victor Genovese” (Tales of the Unanticipated, Fall 1986). This was quickly followed by publications in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Interzone, and others. The awards nods got going with a Nebula nomination for novelette “The Honeycrafters” (F&SF, Oct/Nov 1991). Debut novel Halfway Human (Avon, 1998) was on the James Tiptree Jr. Award shortlist (later renamed the Otherwise Award), was a Gaylactic Spectrum Award nominee, and came very close to winning a Locus Award. To date, Gilman has four novels out, plus novellas, novelettes, a collection (Aliens of the Heart published by Aqueduct in 2007), and a good-sized list of short stories. She won a Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire Award for “Touring with the Alien” (originally published in the April 2016 Clarkesworld); she is also a two-time Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist, a three-time Nebula Award finalist, and a two-time Hugo Award finalist.

After working in museums her entire adult life, Gilman is “trying to write science fiction full time now . . . I once spent five years tracking down all the surviving artifacts related to the Lewis and Clark expedition in museums from Oregon to London. Later, I went to Canada and Great Britain to find Native American artifacts collected by British soldiers during the Revolutionary War. At the National Museum of the American Indian, I wrote text for an exhibit that was so frank about Native history in the United States that my colleagues kept glancing at the Capitol and saying, ‘Are we allowed to say that?’ No one stopped us.”

Along the course of the journey, she’s lived in Idaho, Wisconsin, and Missouri, but is currently still in DC. Among its charms, which includes its international nature, she says, “There is a thriving arts scene, especially live theater. And a freelance museum consultant like me can pick up interesting gigs. My last one was researching the history of Congress for the US Capitol.” Perhaps inevitably, her experiences are reflected in her fiction: “One thing that keeps showing up in my writing: for years I worked in collaboration with Native nations, and I would drive around in the summers to visit reservations, sometimes camping in a tent because there were no motels. I came away with memories of reservation dogs and rowdy nights at powwows, as well as interviewing elders in tents and under trees. I met some people I really admired. I got used to being called ‘washichu’ and worse, but I sure learned a lot. So when I send my characters into the field alone, I know how they feel.”

Carolyn Ives Gilman’s latest is novella Testament of Leaves, due this month from Fairwood Press.

You’ve been publishing fiction for quite a while and have several novels out, plus a lot of short fiction. How do you describe what you do, the vibe of your work, and the things you like to explore?

My work is constantly changing, which can make it hard to market because editors can’t pigeonhole my “brand.” Early in my career I was influenced by the New Wave feminist writers, and I got compared a lot to Ursula K. Le Guin. More recently, I’ve found myself categorized as a hard SF writer, which was a bit startling, but reflected the fact that I like to put science in my science fiction, and I like to get it right. I think the main throughline of my work is an interest in culture and the conflicts that arise when cultures clash.

What has your journey in publishing been like—has it been smooth, have there been ups and downs? What have been the biggest challenges, and how did you deal with them?

My career has had so many ups and downs it gives me vertigo. Every time I think it’s going well, it nosedives and sinks. I’ve had (I think) seven agents now, none of which has yet sold a book for me; I’ve been picked up by two major publishers, then dropped. At one point David Hartwell started to champion my work at Tor, and I thought things were turning around; then he died. The only thing I know to do is keep going, always trying something new. Whenever I resign myself to being unpublished for the rest of my life, something catches on, and I bob up to the surface again, waving at everyone, saying, “Remember me?”

It’s gotten particularly hard recently as the pipeline has gotten constricted due to monopolization in the publishing industry. I sometimes fear that the Big Five are going the way of Hollywood—banking on surefire blockbusters and endless sequels. I hope not.

You were publishing nonfiction before your first fiction publications and have six nonfiction books out, plus a slew of articles. Are there aspects of writing nonfiction that feel similar to writing fiction, or that you find satisfying in similar ways to writing fiction?

Nonfiction is a completely different process for me. When I’m writing it, I have to turn off the fiction-writing part of my brain. Behind the reality partition, I have to police myself never to write a sentence I don’t have evidence for because it is so easy to start fabricating and write what should have happened, or what might have happened, rather than what I can prove. It makes me grumpy about a lot of nonfiction out there—like book-length biographies of people like Sacagawea and Shakespeare, about whom almost nothing is known, and most of what is written is pure fabrication. I see it as part of the general deterioration in the quality of truth. I don’t want to contribute to that.

Still, nonfiction pays a good deal better, and I keep trying to get back to it. If only fiction weren’t so damn fun!

What, for you, are the most difficult aspects of writing short stories, and what do you feel you do really well, and what do you love most about the format?

On any story, I spend the longest time planning it out. Not that I outline or anything crazy like that: I think a lot and take notes. I think about setting and characters and structure and voice. Sitting down to put words into the computer is only the last step. Most people think that’s what writing is—not me. The writing starts long before the first word goes down, and the hardest work is done then.

I gravitate most to novelette and novella lengths: long enough to do some cool worldbuilding and character development, short enough to get beginning, middle, and end in one compact package. I am very happy novellas have become popular again. I think they are perfect for science fiction and fantasy. I feel in good company with people like Ray Nayler, Becky Chambers, Nghi Vo, Seanan McGuire, and T. Kingfisher all writing terrific novellas.

For folks who haven’t read your short fiction, if they were to read one or two short stories, what would you want them to read, and why?

I am always most in love with my most recent work. Testament of Leaves is a pretty good representation of my themes, although it is the first mystery I’ve ever written. It involves indigenous people and moral issues that seem simple on the surface but turn out to have unexpected complexity. The same is true of Exile’s End, which won the Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society. They both show where I am now. Another one that has staying power is “Touring with the Alien,” which first appeared in Clarkesworld. It has since been translated into Polish, Chinese, Czech, French, and Hungarian. The French version won the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire. I find that Europeans love to read stories where aliens invade the United States.

Thinking on your longer works, looking back at Halfway Human, the Forsaken Isles series, Arkfall, Dark Orbit, Exile’s End, and more, and coming up to Testament of Leaves, what has changed about you as a writer over the years? How does this latest work speak to the evolution of your art?

It’s not so much an evolution of my writing as of my thinking. I see a lot more complexity and nuance now; no issue seems simple anymore. In my early work, the problems are hard but morally clear-cut. Now I throw at my characters issues that even puzzle me. They don’t always come up with the same solutions I would, because they are different people and have different values. Still, I respect what they decide.

What was the initial inspiration for Testament of Leaves, and how did the story change or develop over drafts and edits?

I always have to have at least two ideas before I know it’s a story. One is enough for flash fiction, but longer stories take two or more. Both of the ideas for Testament of Leaves came from a notebook where I jot down random ideas when they occur to me, and at first glance they didn’t go together. One was about a linguist struggling to preserve an endangered language. (I have known a few.) The other was about a detective who somehow collaborates with the victim to solve a murder. This latter idea didn’t appeal to me when it sounded like a ghost story; then I read an article about deadbots, those AI programs that allow grieving survivors to talk to their deceased loved ones. I thought, that’s it! That’s how the detective could get to know the victim. Suddenly it was a story.

I’d also been playing around with a setting I wanted to use, so that got thrown into the stew. I’ve been fascinated by ocean ecosystems recently but didn’t want to set a story underwater, so I worked out a way to put coral reefs and kelp forests on land.

Early on, it all seemed like a perfect mess of random ideas, but I trust my subconscious to work it all out, and it did.

What can you tell us about Shameesh Kulkarni, and what is most interesting or compelling about him?

Shameesh actually has a very interesting backstory that you don’t find out in this story; I go into it in sequels. In this story, he is a fish out of water—a conscientious junior investigator thrust into a truly bizarre situation. It puts him so thoroughly off-balance that he bonds with a bot and her octopod sidekick, something he probably wouldn’t have done under normal circumstances. He thinks he is very methodical and systematic, but in fact he ends up making several intuitive leaps. His experiences force him to confront what “justice” means in an unjust situation.

What about Thomas Edison, Bone, and of course, Baxter; what can you tell us about these individuals?

Thomas Edison popped into existence out of thin air, one of those characters that simply demand to be created. Although she wasn’t part of my original plan, she surprised me by turning out to be crucial to the plot.

I had planned for Bone to be part of the story because I wanted to write a mystery in which the victim gets to have a voice. I hadn’t expected her voice to be so quirky. She is coming to terms with being newly dead here and using humor to cope with the situation. Her signature virtue—her dedication and drive—turns out to be her fatal flaw as well, literally. Halfway through, I realized that she and Shameesh are both fundamentally lonely people, and that is why they form an emotional connection.

Baxter is the result of a lot of watching YouTube videos about research into octopus intelligence and behavior. They really are extraordinarily intelligent and curious, given to mischief, and can recognize individual humans and form opinions of them. Baxter is an animal, and not even a domesticated one, so in some ways its motivation is as unknowable as any animal’s. They really are aliens living among us.

What is your approach to writing character, and what did you enjoy most about writing these characters?

Despite all my planning, writing characters is pretty instinctive. I go in with a general impression of who they are and what motivates them, but they quickly outgrow their assigned roles. At least, these ones did. I’ve never had characters so completely take over a story. I knew I had to give them more to do.

In her blurb, Naomi Kritzer describes the mystery in Testament of Leaves as “gripping.” In terms of craft, what, for you, is the key to getting mystery right?

This is the first mystery I’ve ever written. I decided to do it on a whim, thinking, “How hard can it be?” Well, it turned out to have its challenges. I think the big hurdle is to set it up so the solution is both surprising and inevitable. I get cross with mysteries that prioritize surprise over plausibility. Despite their trickiness, mysteries simplify the author’s job by imposing a structure: a crime has been committed, and it has to be solved. I found it quite enjoyable to work within those constraints.

What are some of your favorite aspects of the worldbuilding in Testament of Leaves, and what would you like folks to know about this particular setting?

This story fits into a universe I have written about quite a lot. I call it the Twenty Planets. Every story is about a different planet, but they all coexist in a framework where humanity is expanding into new galactic regions and finding humans already settled wherever they go, presumably because of a previous wave of expansion in the unimaginably distant past. There is no faster-than-light travel in my universe, although there is instantaneous communication. I like the limits this places on the stories, and the consequences for people who travel between star systems.

In this story, I introduce the Service, which is a kind of interstellar NGO that offers humanitarian aid and expertise to less developed planets. In a way, it’s a tribute to the late US-AID. I knew a lot of people who lost their life’s mission when it was uncreated.

What is central to this book for you—what is Testament of Leaves ultimately about?

I knew that “Testament” had to be in the title from the start because that’s what it is about—what testament we want to leave behind us, what message to the world that we existed. For Shameesh, it is his testimony as to the truth, a responsibility that is at the core of his values. For Bone, it is the second chance to leave a legacy, even though she has to do it as a bot. For the villagers, the testament is their ancestors speaking to them in a language they don’t even remember, but which preserves who they are against all odds.

You’ve mentioned that this novella will become a series of stories. Can you speak a little bit about what’s in store, without spoiling too much?

At the end, Testament of Leaves was just about begging for a sequel. Bone, Baxter, and Shameesh are just too good a team to leave without some other mysteries to solve. In the next story, they have to figure out how to work together, and it’s a hot mess at first. In the story after that, Shameesh has to go home to get married, which means having to discover the truth about his family and his past. Of course, someone dies in each story.

The thing I love about this setup is that each mystery can take place on a different planet, which gives me a chance to invent an endless series of worlds, social systems, and situations. I’ll never get bored.