Travels with Lucius

Lucius Shepard has been traveling for most of his life, starting at age 15, when he fled his Southern gentry roots and caught a freighter to Ireland.

The Best of Lucius Shepard, due this August from specialty genre publisher Subterranean, packs two decades of travelogue into 600-plus pages. 1985's Nebula-winning novella “R&R” (later expanded into his best-known novel, Life During Wartime) is here; so is “The Jaguar Hunter,” the title story from his 1988 World Fantasy Award—winning collection, which was also a New York Times Notable Book. Both tales draw closely on Shepard's extensive travels in Central America; so does the nonfiction volume he's currently revising. With Christmas in Honduras: Men, Myths, and Miscreants in Modern Central America, coming in December from Thunder's Mouth Press, weaves Shepard's experiences with those of adventurer and soldier-of-fortune Lee Christmas, who was deeply involved in the early history of the United Fruit Company and, Shepard says, “sort of engineered the taking over of Honduras and Guatemala.”

Shepard, born in 1947 and force-fed classic literature by a demanding father, resisted the idea of writing professionally for decades. Immersing himself in cultural undergrounds around the world, he spent time as an aide to a notorious Cairo smuggler and as the bouncer at a Spanish brothel. Returning to the U.S., he enrolled in college but didn't graduate; he set off again, finding his way to southeast Asia and Latin America. Then in 1980, his wife sent a half-finished story he'd written to Michigan's respected Clarion Workshop for science-fiction authors, and his fate was sealed. He graduated from Clarion, divorced (a grown son works in New York City) and was named the genre's best new writer in 1985. To date he's produced a dozen novels, scores of shorter tales and a scattering of nonfiction. He's a frequent Hugo and Nebula Award finalist.

Today, he's behind his desk in the modest Vancouver, Wash., apartment where he lives alone, spends eight or nine hours a day at his computer, and writes vividly surrealistic speculative fiction. “Living in a strip mall isn't that fun,” he says. There's a supermarket next door, and fast food outlets, gas stations and coffee shops stand like weeds along his busy urban street. But for Shepard, the setting is productive. He has seven half-finished novellas on his hard drive and several short stories in progress.

When he's not sequestered, he's always on the move. Shepard has taught at Clarion since completing the program, toured the Midwest with a series of bands in the 1970s (that experience permeates his 2007 novella “Stars Seen Through Stone”) and rode the rails on assignment for Spin magazine in the 1990s, where he “met a lot of interesting people—some with livers, some not.” He's packing now for another extended trip, this time to Switzerland and Brazil in connection with a small independent film project. The details are sketchy, but he sounds enthusiastic despite describing film writing as akin to filling in crossword puzzles. He's also written for an upcoming Heavy Metal movie, but admits, “I don't know if they'll use any of it,” and is equally vague as to specifics. Meanwhile, he reviews movies for ElectricStory.Com and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, often railing against commercial blockbusters while praising obscure labors of love.

But fiction is his raison d'être. He's writing a short story for a Jack Vance tribute anthology (“Vance is about the only science fiction writer I like now” ) and a new novel that isn't exactly about vampires: “it's kind of a weird concept,” he says. “If you're a vampire, you'll probably think it's about people.”

He considers the novel he's working on, which he calls “a bone crusher” due to its extensive length, more commercial than most of his previous work, and plans to focus more on novels in the future, with the expectation of garnering interest from larger, mainstream houses. Shepard has traveled all over the real world and charted worlds only he has been to, and now, with his bone crusher, heads into entirely new terrain.