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Wednesday 29 April 2009
Excerpts from Locus Magazine's April Issue interview.
People say, 'There should be rules to magic.' Why? It's magic. I understand you shouldn't be able to do anything you want, necessarily, but it shouldn't be like the laws of physics laid on magic. I'm much more interested in surreal kinds of things, where you don't know how things work but you don't care...
Saturday 25 April 2009
Excerpts from Locus Magazine's April Issue interview.
I don't much buy into this idea that you should only write what you know. That you shouldn't try to write outside your own culture -- that I shouldn't try to write from the point of view of a black person or a woman for example. I always thought that as a writer it was part of your job to do exactly that. Empathy.
Monday 30 March 2009
Excerpts from Locus Magazine's March Issue interview.
So much of my fiction isn't fiction; it's dealing with conflicts, with fears, with loves. It's the soup of my subconscious. I take inciting events and losses in my characters' lives from a lot of conflicts inside myself. I just have a muscle in me that processes life through story.
Thursday 26 March 2009
Excerpts from Locus Magazine's March Issue interview.
I worry about the future of books. My son and his friends don't read nearly as much as they would have before the Internet came along. But writers have always lurched from disaster to disaster. It's never been possible to make a living. I don't know how we do it! It's magic.
Monday 16 March 2009
There may be no more fantastical city than Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, situated on the banks of the Vltava River. Its roots in fantasy go much deeper than Franz Kafka, who once lived in a room in the city's walls...
Tuesday 3 March 2009
Publishing is not printing, or marketing, or editorial, or copy-editing, or typesetting. It may comprise some or all of these things, but you could have the world's best-edited, most beautiful, well-bound book in the world, and without a strategy for getting it into the hands of readers, all it's good for is insulating the attic.
Monday 2 March 2009
Nick Gevers interviews the creators and editors of Short Fiction.
SF, the "literature of the open mind", a mode of entertainment that (generally) preaches tolerance, rationality, and inquisitiveness, isn't a bad thing for the world to embrace. Speaking from my own experience, growing up in an environment with a lot of racial prejudice and religious intolerance, SF was the single most important liberating factor in my personal evolution.
Wednesday 25 February 2009
Excerpts from Locus Magazine's February Issue interview.
Some people will read the book I've got in progress and laugh at how much I've come full-circle to a Philip K. Dick pastiche, but there will be a layer I don't think will require that understanding whatsoever. My goal is to have it explode category by its breadth, not because of some opposition to the genre methods but by its engulfment of them.
Monday 23 February 2009
Gary Westfahl identifies the seven Fallacies of Prediction, debunks some of SF's current predictions about the future, and offers some predictions of his own.
The history of human life on Earth cannot be accurately described as a steady progress from an imagined primitivism to an imagined state of civilization; rather, it is best characterized as a steady expansion in the number of choices available to humans. Today, you can live in the past, you can live in the present, or you can live in the future.
Monday 16 February 2009
Nick Gevers interviews the creators and editors of Short Fiction
The compensation that comes with editing a book like Eclipse is that you have flexibility, that you don't have to have unicorns or rayguns or illustrate some theory or agenda. As an editor, there's a real freedom to experiment, to indulge yourself a little, and not feel you're compromising the book.
Thursday 29 January 2009
Excerpts from Locus Magazine's January Issue interview.
Pandemonium is very much a post-9/11 book. I was amazed at the way we adjusted to this shocking event so quickly. The same thing happens in my book. After demonic possession has been going on for decades, people just cope with it, almost naturally. (Possession even explains some parts of history, like Richard Nixon!)
Wednesday 28 January 2009
Excerpts from Locus Magazine's January Issue interview.
In the early days, we science fiction readers were like cellar Christians: they didn't talk to anybody else because everybody else laughed at them, but they kept running into each other. Mostly they were writing letters to each other, all over the country -- all over the world, actually. I had pen pals in France and England, although I had hardly ever been out of Brooklyn.
Wednesday 7 January 2009
The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn't help my writing. This advice was wrong creatively, professionally, artistically, and personally, but I know where the writer who doled it out was coming from...
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2008
Earlier archives (interviews on Issues pages):
2007 ( Issues)
2006 ( Issues)
2005 ( Issues)
2004 ( Issues)
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