Meet Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

1. What do you love about sci-fi and fantasy?

Ray Bradbury (who has written some of the most beautiful passages in the English language) has said that science fiction is about making reality behave by pretending to look the other way. While it looks to a good many people like escapist literature, it’s really far from it. Science fiction—as Uncle Ray says—is about working out current-day issues and problems by casting them into the future and framing them in a new context. 
Ursula LeGuin, meanwhile, has said that the writer’s job is to put into words what cannot be put into words.

Since I’m naturally inclined to problem solving and seem almost driven to try to communicate abstract ideas to other people, these two descriptions of what it is to write science fiction resonate with me.

Science fiction and fantasy offer such a wonderful palette of colors for communication. I think in no other genres can we get at some of the most critical questions of life: What does it mean to be human? Who are we in the scheme of things? What lies just beyond our imagination?

I also love to build worlds and societies, to try out ideas in those contexts that can’t or won’t be tried out here because people are so darn uncooperative. (Well, characters can be uncooperative too, but that’s a different interview.)

2. Why do you incorporate religion into your stories?

Religion is at the heart of my universe. It is at the core of who I am. This is true for a great many people and it’s true of societies, as well. The moral teachings at the heart of every society came from its religion, whatever that faith is. I grew up in the Christian faith, but my experience of living in a Muslim country when I was very small, eventually brought me to realize that if I had been born somewhere other than California, I might have a different viewpoint and a different faith. Because of this, the study of religion has long been of keen interest to me. I want to understand other people’s faiths and their faith experiences.

I’ve been a Bahá'í all my adult life and it’s brought me a new appreciation of the effect of religion and faith on society. I’m fascinated by the metaphors used in the religious scriptures and all the ways that men can find to interpret them and extrapolate them into dogma. I’m fascinated by the way we choose what in our scriptures we hear and what we ignore because the choices so shape our thought processes and the way we relate to other people—especially people from different cultures and faiths.

When I write I always try to take faith and religion into account  as a character’s private devotion or as a culture’s belief system or both. I honestly feel a story is more real if it does this—deeper and more resonant. It can help to create a character’s personality, explain his strengths and weaknesses and dilemmas or illuminate why a culture has the “fixtures” that it does.

I find it exciting to ask “what if” about religion—what if a particular phrase in the Bhagavad Gita or the Bible was interpreted this way instead of that way? What changes might we see in doctrine and the affected cultures as a result? What moral dilemmas might we avoid or encounter? What problems would we create and how would we solve them or, better yet, how might God correct them?

3. What inspired "Cruel and Unusual Punishment"?

I was pondering with great sorrow the horrific specter of two groups of people both calling themselves Christians committing acts that must surely make the Lord weep. How could this happen? What could make these people realize that what they were doing was a betrayal of faith, not an affirmation of it?

My sorrow gave way to anger as it sometimes does, especially when children are hurt or killed, and I found myself wanting to pray to God to visit horrible punishments on these people. Well, I knew that wasn’t right. One doesn’t condemn someone for having a disease, and that’s what this was—a disease of the soul.

So I prayed about it and wondered what justice looked like in this context. And I realized that what I really wanted was for these people to be called to account­—to realize the full import of their behavior. In a word, I wanted them to be enlightened. And as I thought about it, I realized that enlightenment—to fully and completely realize the full extent, impact, and spiritual consequence of our crimes or sins—is the most awful punishment imaginable. In fact, I don’t think it IS imaginable. The very thought is squirm-inducing as more than one editor told me when I started submitting this story. This is why the human mind copes with such cognitive dissonance (Christ taught us to love our neighbors, but I have killed mine out of hatred.) by rationalizing away the dissonance.

What if we had a method of stripping that rationalization away so that the perpetrator of a crime was confronted with the full repercussions of it? I wanted to explore that, and that led to “A Cruel and Unusual Punishment.”

4. What's next for you?

Right now I’m working on a fantasy about a supernatural detective agency and getting ready to start another Star Wars novel (to be entitled HOLOSTAR) with Michael Reaves—my Jedi Master. I’m working on several pieces of short fiction as well—including one about an angel who finds out the hard way why the Prophets use parables.