(lily 4. 2003 • |M l M tf<3g
he writer’s craft requires years of appren
ticeship—of learning to put into words
what the imagination creates. Every expe
rience, every new idea, sets itself some
where in the mental computer—and all are
fuel for the fire.
For David D. Levine, the many trips taken
to Milwaukee bookstores with his science
fiction-loving father, a professor of computer
science at University of Wisconsin, opened
dtxirs early to a mind ripe to see possibilities far
beyond the mundane.
A software engineer in the world of necessi
ty, Levines persona in the science fiction genre
strays nicely into fantasy. In the past two years
his stories have begun to gain more attention
with editors and readers, and he has been nom
inated for and won some fairly prestigious
awards.
The Portlander is touted as one of the new
writers to watch for, as if he just emerged from
the slush pile. For him, though, this has been
no sudden hurst onto the scene hut a carefully
nurtured process.
“This is something I’ve always wanted to
do,” he says. “I’ve been focusing a lot of my
love and attention on it. And the effort I’ve
put into it seems to finally he bearing fruit.”
Hard science and combat may pepper
Levine’s short stories, hut a tenderness and spir
itually significant components emerge as well.
His characters’ sexual identities run the known
and unknown continuum of possibilities.
Take “Nucleon," the short story that won
the Irish James White Literary Award. “I know
that the main character is gay,” Levine notes.
“But you could easily read the story and not
realize that.”
The piece hinges around an artist who
T
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Nucleon family
Portland sci-fi w rite r ’s characters go ev e r y w hich w ay
by
P a t r ic ia
L. M a c A o d h a
makes “junklets” from things
found in a junkyard and the
elderly owner he befriends.
“That story,” Levine says, “came
out bigger than me.”
It was not his first published
effort but is the one that, in
many ways, put him on the map
with sci-fi fans. Since then, he
has won other honors and
received a nomination for the
John W. Campbell Award for
best new writer. The voting
takes place later this summer at
the annual WorldCon—the
World Science Fiction Society’s
convention—in Toronto.
L
evine, who is bisexual,
acknowledges that he initial
ly would just assume that “all „. ,
,
i .
I,
Check out www. bentopress.com to find David D. Levine’s short
my characters are bisexual, hut
some of them don’t know it
Paws,” about “a man coming to terms with his
yet." Now he will admit some really are “pretty
father’s decision to turn himself into a dog, is
exclusively gay or straight.” Then he goes on
my take on society’s reaction to transsexuality.”
into all kinds of possibilities and combinations.
Levine wanted to wait until he had market
In “The Tale of the Golden Eagle," for
recognition before writing a novel. That btxik
instance, a man falls in love with a robot. In
is now in progress, and “all the characters have
“Gojo,” the main character “is an alien from a
some kind of alternative sexuality. One is a
species that, like a salmon, has sex only once
bisexual-identified polyamorous woman; anoth
and then dies,” while “I Hold My Father’s
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er is a gay-identified man who, to his surprise, •
falls in love with the woman; and the third is a
female alien whose kink is gay sex with male
humans.”
The experiences of Levine’s characters have
come close to some of his own realities, but he
still hasn’t been able to effectively use his
coming-out experience. "That story still
needs to be written,” he says, “and I
mean to return to it someday when I
think I’ve matured more as a writer."
Need for work drove Levine into
technical writing, which he did for 15
years and which, he says, stifled his abil
ity to write creatively. During that time
he worked with Oregon Science Fiction
Conventions, which produces the annu
al OryCon— Portland’s science fiction
convention—and sometimes the larger
WesterCon.
Through his membership in a local
science fiction organization, he met his
partner, Kate Yule, and together they
put out their own ’zine, Bento, and
attend about eight conventions a year.
Levine often reads at the cons, with a
style that recalls his training in the the
ater. He regularly draws overflow audi
ences, even without the promise of free
fiction
chocolate to attendees.
Architect of imagination and voyager
into new worlds of ideas, Levine is well on his
way to making the writer’s craft a full-time job.
He is very much in the vanguard of ever new
and challenging changes in the science fiction
and fantasy genre. JH
P atricia L. M a c A o d h a is a Portland free-lance
writer. E-mail her at patmacM@juno.com.
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