R.S.A. Garcia is a writer of speculative fiction and a Sturgeon, Nebula, Locus, and IGNYTE Award finalist. Her Amazon Bestselling science fiction mystery, Lex Talionis, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and the Silver Medal for Best Scifi/Fantasy/Horror Ebook from the Independent Publishers Awards (2015). She has published short fiction in venues such as Clarkesworld Magazine, Escape Pod, Strange Horizons, and Internazionale Magazine. Her stories have been long-listed for the British Science Fiction Awards, translated into several languages, and included in a number of anthologies, including the critically acclaimed The Best of World SF, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, and The Apex Book of World SF. Her sci-fantasy duology, beginning with The Nightward, is forthcoming from Harper Voyager in Fall 2024. She lives in Trinidad and Tobago with an extended family and too many cats. “Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200” is her first appearance in Uncanny, a thoughtful examination of the intersection of technology and humanity.
Uncanny Magazine: This is a heartwarming story about aging and loneliness, technology, and a goat that eats everything. What was the starting point or inspiration for the story?
R.S.A. Garcia: I was having a conversation with friends on WhatsApp, and we were joking around about how we grew up, and the conversation turned to, of all things, how we would tend to goats in the future, and one friend was like, you know they eat everything, and the story dropped into my head, fully formed. I literally told them, got to go, just had a story idea, must go write it down! Eight hours later, Tantie and the Farmhand were born. The name, Tantie Merle, will be familiar to anyone from the West Indies, as it is also an homage to a character created by the legendary West Indian oral storyteller, Paul Keens-Douglas.
Uncanny Magazine: Tantie Merle is a lovely well-developed character. What do you need to know about your characters before you can start writing? Do they ever do anything you don’t expect?
R.S.A. Garcia: Thank you for saying so! My characters tend to show up as a voice in my head. Other than that, the most important thing for me to know before I start writing is where and why they are. If I have a setting and a reason for their presence in it, I can expand on that. I’m very much a pantser. I’m used to going in and letting the character and story take me where it wants to go. I discover my characters along the way, just like the reader, so yes, they often surprise me. Sometimes it’s what they haven’t told me before, sometimes it’s because they are lying to me and/or themselves. But I live for those moments when it all comes together in my head and I say, oh THAT’S who you are! Tantie was one of those where she was fully herself from the first word I wrote and was a lot of fun to write because of that.
Uncanny Magazine: What research did you do for this story? Did you turn up anything interesting that you weren’t able to include?
R.S.A. Garcia: I’ve been fiddling around with machine learning and what it can and can’t do, and what it might be able to do in time, so a lot of the inspiration was a riff on what’s not possible yet, but what we keep calling AI. My thought was, what if the singularity arises due to an empathetic purpose, like the desire to help and be of service to those in need, instead of data mining an Internet that’s basically a repository of our worst impulses? Not a lot of the technicalities of how machine learning works went into the story because I didn’t feel a light, humorous story needed to be weighed down by those details. In any case, I’ve always considered my speculative fiction to be about the study of humanity in extraordinary circumstances, so my focus tends to be more on how the creation and use of technology affects us, rather than fine details about how it works. I greatly admire hard science writers, like Arula Ratnakar, who can tell a story, include all the details, and still make it engaging and exciting.
Uncanny Magazine: If you could have a Farmhand 4200, would you want one?
R.S.A. Garcia: I absolutely would! Lincoln is childlike in his joy of learning and helping. I think of him as a pure soul finally transforming into who he really is. He hasn’t got a bad impulse in him because Tantie was there for him. As someone who still cries every time I watch WALL-E, I definitely want my own little task-focused, helpful robot.
Uncanny Magazine: Who are some of your literary influences? What is something you’ve read recently and loved?
R.S.A. Garcia: Ha! There have been a lot, like most authors. Some of the major ones include Jean Rhys, Edgar Mittelholzer, Earl Lovelace, Stephen King, Margaret Weis, Katherine Kerr, Elizabeth Bear, Sidney Sheldon, Robert Ludlum, Octavia Butler, William Goldman, Ed McBain, Louisa May Alcott, Lisa Kleypas, Alan Garner, Martha Wells, C.S. Lewis, and Nalo Hopkinson.
When I’m working, I tend to avoid certain kinds of speculative fiction because I want a break from work, and I’ll feel like I’m reading for analysis rather than pleasure. So, I read my sci-fi in smaller doses, like short stories and novellas, and I also read historical or sci-fi romance. What I loved recently in short fiction includes “Douen” by Suzan Palumbo, “When Shiva Shattered the Time-Stream” by Sharang Biswas, “We Built This City” by Marie Vibbert, and “A Season’s Lament” by Patricia Miller. I’m also enjoying Rudy Dixon’s Risdaverse Series, and I thought Ogres by Adrian Tchaikovsky built up to a gut-punch I won’t soon forget.
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
R.S.A. Garcia: Quite a few things! I’m editing the first book in my duology for Harper Voyager that comes out next year. The Nightward is a sci-fantasy The Witcher meets Caribbean mythology set in a world where women warrior-magicians rule. I’m also working on a fantasy novella for Android Press, “The Unbearable Taste of Fruit and Wine,” which takes place in the aftermath of a devastating magical war when the assistant to an Archmagus meets a charming thief and has everything she’s ever believed upended. And I have a couple more novellas I’m writing in the same world as my Nebula, Locus, and Ignyte nominated novella, “Bishop’s Opening.”
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
© 2023 Uncanny Magazine
