Ian Tregillis was born and raised in Minnesota, where his parents somehow gave him a Cornish surname and Macedonian blood. (The full story, he's told, involves taconite ore and a stolen horse.)

He received a doctorate in physics from the University of Minnesota in 2002 for research on radio galaxies and quasars. He is an alumnus of the 2005 Clarion Writers' Workshop. Nowadays he lives in New Mexico, where he consorts with writers, scientists, and other diresputable types.

His science-fantasy trilogy, The Milkweed Triptych, is forthcoming from Tor.

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AN EXTENDED INTERVIEW WITH IAN TREGILLIS
by Ty Franck

TF: You are a first time Wild Cards writer, thrust into a collaboration with longtime writers like George R.R. Martin, Melinda Snodgrass, and John J. Miller.  No big deal, right?  Easy transition to make?

IT: I have to admit I found it very daunting at first.  It's hard to enter a group of people who have known each other and worked together for so many years without feeling at least a little trepidation.  And it took a while for me to get the hang of things-- getting to know people, learning how the process works, understanding how the discussions unfold...  But I'm not very argumentative by nature, so the negotiation aspect of Wild Cards wasn't difficult for me.  If anything, I had to learn how to be a little more assertive with my own ideas and opinions.

But the Wild Cards experience got a little easier once I became accustomed to George's method of delivering editorial notes, which is to scrawl them on a brick and then hurl the brick through my window.  It was disconcerting at first, but now I have a nice three-season porch. Melinda, in contrast, delivers her editorial suggestions in rhyming couplets of Linear B, which on the one hand is less destructive but on the other hand takes more effort to decode.

 

TF: Let's talk about Rusty.  His background is pretty far from what could be called the standard hero origin tale.  Where did the idea come from?

IT: I wanted to create an ace from my home state.  I started by looking for a unique environment that wasn't just a rehash of the typical things people bring to mind when they think of Minnesota: mosquitos, walleye fishing, and Garrison Keillor.

 My parents grew up in different parts of the Iron Range in northern Minnesota.  I remember them telling me stories about how in some places the dirt would turn the color of rust because it had such a high iron content.  We'd go up there to visit relatives when I was very young, and I'd marvel at the big open pit mines and the rust-colored tint along the side of the road.  It struck me as the kind of place that would imprint itself indelibly on a person growing up there.  It certainly did in my parents' cases.

 

TF: Rusty's fascinating because on the surface he is the most visibly invulnerable character in the book, and yet that's all it is, just on the surface.  Tell me about where that vulnerability comes from.

 IT: Rusty, like his creator, is a fragile flower.  A delicate blossom.

 Also, it seemed natural to try to contrast his outer appearance as a mighty joker ace with his inner life as an insecure kid.  That seemed like a natural way to go with him as Inside Straight started coming together, particularly when Michael Cassutt explained how he wanted to use Rusty in his own story.

 

TF: You also deal with some fairly sensitive social issues in Rusty's story. Talk about that a little bit.

 IT: Rusty's story, "The Tin Man's Lament", comes directly out of an earlier story in Inside Straight, Michael Cassutt's "Looking for Jetboy".  So Michael gets the credit for tackling social issues.  Once he outlined what he wanted to do with Rusty in his story, we discussed the ramifications and kicked around some ideas for how things would pan out in my story.

 After we knew where things were headed, it was a matter of sitting down and figuring out how Rusty would feel about the things that had happened to him.  The thing that struck me the most was how difficult and frustrating it would be to get thrust into such a contentious situation without having the social skills to defend myself.  I think there would come a point where any attempt to address the issue would feel like stepping into a minefield.

 

TF: Earlier interviews have talked about the challenge of writing a Wild Cards story set in the world of reality TV, internet bloggers, and cell phone cameras.  Where most superhero stories seem to avoid the difficulty of putting their characters in a setting where the average citizen is walking around with more personal technology than a supervillian of the 1970's, Wild Cards embraces it.  How do you feel that this tight connection to modern reality changes the superhero story?

 IT: Man, you're deep.  You're making me think.  Stop it.

 I once asked Melinda Snodgrass, who in a former life was an attorney, if insurance policies in the Wild Cards universe carried standard exemptions for "acts of aces" in addition to "acts of God".  (I mean, if my house gets demolished because two aces decide to fight on the street outside, who has to pay for that?)  She said, "You bet they would."  Watching a pair of superheroes duke it out?  That's fantasy.  Getting shafted by the insurance company?  That's real life.

 The thing about modern reality, and real life in general, is that it just keeps happening.  Day after day after day.  So what if you have iron skin or can turn into a cloud of wasps or can move earth with your mind? Because at the end of the day, somebody has to pay the mortgage.

 There's a scene in the first Spider-Man movie where we see a shot of New Yorkers going about their daily business on the streets of Manhattan, pausing briefly to gawk as Spider-Man swoops overhead.  I absolutely love that scene, because it gives me a sense of what it would be like to live in a Manhattan where superheroes roamed.  But the thing that strikes me every time I watch that is how, if that scene had run longer than a few seconds, we'd see all of those people on the street shrugging to themselves -- "Wow, that was neat" -- before going back to their mundane lives: picking up the dry cleaning, eating lunch, dropping off the kids. Life goes on, with or without superheroes.

 So I think that grounding a superhero story in modern reality means remembering that to the people in that world, superpowers are just a part of life.  Kind of like the way we take cell phones and notebook computers for granted, even though these things would have flabbergasted people just 50 years ago.

 

TF: Ultimately Rusty makes what could be argued is the most important decision in the book.  Because of this, he is an integral character and shows up in a number of stories other than your own.  How did you deal with having so many other writers give their take on your creation?  How often did you have to fix his unique style of dialogue?

 IT: I was very pleased that other folks wanted to use Rusty in their own stories.  I'm fairly easygoing when it comes to these things, so I didn't feel compelled to try to micromanage the way he appeared in every story. Part of the fun for me has been in seeing how the other writers interpret and use our cast of characters.

 But he does have his own way of speaking.  I think the brunt of the work fell on the writers who had included Rusty in their stories before "The Tin Man's Lament" came together, and who therefore didn't have a reference for how Rusty speaks until late in the process.  So in a couple of places there were tweaks to the dialogue in order to make Rusty consistent across all the stories.  S. L. Farrell in particular gave Rusty quite a bit of screentime in his story, "Incidental Music for Heroes"; he did a yeoman's job of altering almost every place where Rusty spoke.

 

TF: Conversely, what was the most difficult character for you to write?

IT:  Hardhat.  No question about it.  I don't curse nearly as extensively nor as creatively as Hardhat does.  I actually had to do research to find enough things for him to say without recycling my small handful of stock phrases.

 I can't decide if I should be embarrassed or proud of that.

 

TF: I'm asking everyone the same fanboy question:  Favorite Wild Cards character ever?

 IT: Definitely Modular Man.  Walter Jon Williams's Modular Man stories are some of my favorite parts of the Wild Cards series.

 

TF: Inside Straight is the first book of the new trilogy.  Can you give us a hint where Rusty might be heading?

 IT: Let's just say he won't be an inarticulate rube forever.  Discovering a wish-granting monkey paw will change his life in radical and unexpected ways.  He will, however, continue to visit Earth from his castle on the moon, so expect to see more Rustbelt stories in the future. (Oh, and that's Doctor Rustbelt to you.)