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OtherRealms Issue 21 Part 03
Electronic OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988
Part 3
An Interview with Chairman Bruce
Bruce Sterling
Interviewed by Alan Wexelblat
Copyright 1988 by Bruce Sterling and Alan Wexelblat
A conversation with Bruce Sterling is a little like an intellectual
roller-coaster ride. He moves from Fuller to Gibson, from politics to
writing, with a mental agility that's hard to chase. This interview
occurred shortly after Sterling returned from a publicity tour in Japan.
AW: How was Japan?
BS: I must have had my picture taken 1500 times. That's no
exaggeration. Professional photographers would accompany every
journalist and while I was there they'd set up parabolic reflectors and
just shoot off two or three rolls of film. And they had these 35-
millimeter Nikon things with wide-angle lenses. And they'd be sitting
there and you're trying to establish some point with some guy and
they're off wandering around trying to get angles and whenever you
gesture or anything that's at all dramatic ... k'snee! k'snee! k'snee!
Or you light a cigarette -- click-click, click, click-click-click.
AW: Other than the photographers, how was it?
BS: Well, it was a big kick. Y'know, it's a big thrill to be treated
like a rock star. I had an entourage with me.... Editors and a translator
and a couple of gofers. At one point an adoring journalist followed me
around for about three hours, literally, watching everything I did.
Unfortunately, I didn't realize he was a journalist; I thought he was
some other guy. I was having a very interesting, unguarded conversation
with him and it turned out he was a journalist. But it was okay. I
think he was very flattered that I was so friendly and open with him.
It was a business gig. I was over there doing five and six interviews a
day, a couple of video standups, and endless business lunches. A party
I went to, it turned out to be this posh publisher's gig where I was
guest of honor. I didn't even know.
AW: You probably showed up wearing jeans.
BS: No, no. I was smart -- I dressed just like they did. They all wear
baggy black suit jackets and skinny black ties. Black pants and black
shoes. Everybody in London wears black, everybody in New York wears black,
everybody in Tokyo wears black. So, I just put on the local color and
that was cool. Everyone was very polite. The Japanese are very gracious.
It was a promo thing. I had a few hours that I was able to do things
and I went out and bought rock albums and stuff. A couple of mornings I
got up early and walked around in the neighborhood.
AW: You didn't do any touristy kinds of things?
BS: No. I didn't go to any Zen temples or any of that. I went to the
Budokan, but I didn't know what it was. Y'know, I went and walked
around this huge building and thought, God what an interesting thing.
Later I found a street sign that indicated what it was. It's this
enormous domed stadium that's in this industrial Chinese style. It's an
auditorium, but it's got those peaked-roof things like the Chinese do
and a big gold ball on top. It's a real monstrous hybrid. I thought it
was beautiful; I really feed on that kind of thing.
AW: What are their release schedules like? Do their books come out the
same time they come out here?
BS: No. They've got to be translated. I don't think Islands has been
translated yet. Schismatrix is in its second printing now and
Mirrorshades is just out now. And I've got a new book which is going to
come out over there presently that will be called Semi No Jo-o which is
a Sterling short-story collection which has no English-language
edition. It's just a Japanese Sterling book.
AW: I've been tracking your stuff down, but I can't find your short
fiction anywhere.
BS: It's never been collected. That will soon be remedied. I've signed
to do a big, extensive illustrated Arkham House edition of Sterling
short stories. It's got almost every short story I've ever published.
It'll be like 100,000 words.
AW: Anything new?
BS: Nothing that hasn't appeared in one place or another. But a lot of
my work has appeared in markets like Interzone which has, like, 2,000
people who read it and and it's in England, so it might as well be new.
AW: Let's start with Islands. What was interesting to me was that it's
written from a woman's point of view. Did you find that hard to do?
BS: It was difficult, but it's certainly not the first thing I've
written from a woman's point of view. There's Spider Rose, which has a
woman in it. And there are long sections of Schismatrix which are
narrated from the point of view of Nora Mavrides, Lindsay's wife. If
anything, I found it kind of liberating because it was easier to get to
the emotional core of matters when you've got a character who's allowed
to be more demonstrative than a man would be in a similar situation.
AW: We haven't gotten any farther in 30 years in men's liberation?
BS: I don't know whether that's so or not, but on a fictional level, it's
easier to access that sort of thing. One of the things is that she's not
a techie. That's a science-fiction writer's trick because the difficulty
you face is that you've got to have people explaining machines and
gadgets. Jules Verne knew this. He always has at least one average Joe
where the professor can stop and say, "For, you see...," "Here's the
airlock," and "This is what we call a diving suit... blah blah blah."
So Laura Webster is a public-relations person, but her husband's an
architect, so we're full of little things like that which came across
more naturally with [her there].
AW: You've commented that having a baby was "like growing a new leg." A
baby figures very prominently in Islands. Is that a reflection of your
own life, or was that planned before you had the baby?
BS: There was a baby in the book before we had our own. Certainly,
having a baby allowed me to make the baby a much more
fictionally-convincing thing. In the original draft the baby was sort
of like a piece of wood, like a prop. Now it's much more like an infant
human being actually is. Although I have to admit it's an exceptionally
well- behaved baby.
But the reason there's a baby there is because this book is about the
long term. When you've got a child it teaches you to think in that way.
I think that a lot of science fiction is written in a way that's sort of
peculiar. Even though it's supposedly extrapolative, it's often immediately
focussed. It's not until you have a baby that you feel like you're in
life. Suddenly you're dealing with real consequences because they're
not just yours, they're some innocent's, and you're responsible. It
sort of roots you in life in a way that being alone and fancy-free doesn't.
For many years I was proud that I could fit all my possessions into a
Volkswagen. I moved around and lived a student's life and everything. I
always figured if things get bad, you pick up and move on. But you're
dealing with real consequences when you've got kids. And this book is
about consequences. So it's a necessary thing.
AW: Besides not being able to fit your life in Volkswagen, what else
has the baby changed? What was a day in Bruce Sterling's life like
before the baby compared with after?
BS: It's hard to separate the differences that having a baby has meant.
I can't really weed those out from the natural progression of my life
and my own career. I used to have a day job. I couldn't support myself
as a writer. Now I'm modestly successful. I'm leading a sort of fake
middle-class life here. I can't really afford it but I can sort of
pretend that I can, and get away with it. I have so far.
AW: Another thing you said that's really stuck with me that I wanted to
ask you about was "Just wait, man. Wait to see what's going to happen
in ten years." This is in response to people who claim cyberpunk is a
fad. I'm curious what sort of thought-out vision of where you and maybe
the rest of the cyberpunk writers will be in ten years.
BS: I can't speak for anybody else, but I can certainly draw a line
that leads from the first book I published, which was ten years ago, to
the work I'm doing now, which is, I think, vastly more powerful and
sophisticated.
I'm not like Jimi Hendrix here. I'm not about to choke to death on my
own vomit just because I turned 34, or 28 or however the hell old he
was when he died. People think we're rock stars, they really do. They
get into a habit of treating us as rock stars because they figure "No
one's going to be this famous very long. And the drugs are gonna get
them. The drugs or the money or the women or whatever modish vice
destroys you."
They don't realize that this is a long-term thing. And people,
especially people who aren't real sci-fi people, don't really know what
a real science fiction writer's career is like. I mean, science fiction
writers -- once they get their feet firmly planted and their sucker
deep in the juice -- just never go away. I mean, we've got people who
are the top people in science fiction now who are septuagenarians.
They're seventy years old, and still on the New York Times Best Seller
list, selling more books than they ever did.
How many seventy-year-old rock stars do you know?
AW: I've found there's a vast difference between the current
generation of writers and the older generation. For one thing, approachability.
BS: Approachable in what sense?
AW: It's a personality-type thing, like the rock star business. Like
you're more-real people.
BS: I think that must be a generational thing. I imagine that if you
were Andy Offutt's age and had seen what he's seen, you'd find his work
a lot easier to grasp. Our work does appeal to certain kinds of people.
It strikes them in a way that they have not been struck by science
fiction before. That's why we get a lot of interest from people who are
in the arts or in graphics or video or sculptors or ... not what you'd
call SF fans. Because they recognize that we talk about the zeitgeist,
that we talk about the late 20th century. You have to realize that a
lot of people find our work very off-putting.
I consider reading Gibson to be one of the easiest things... His work
seems incredibly pellucid and smooth. He literally drags you through...
you sail through his work. But I know people who I think are fine,
intelligent, decent upstanding salt-of-the-earth type people, who
literally can't handle Gibson at all. They open it and it's like
Sanskrit. They fry. They can't handle it. I can't say why that is, but
it is a real phenomenon, a fact of life.
You'd like to think that you could speak of the broadest possible
audience, but on the other hand it doesn't really do you any good as a
writer to do damage to your own perceptions and your own message. You
have to trust your instincts, really. Because if you don't you're going
to end up writing stuff that seems labored and false.
AW: You write for the Muse and not to pay the bills?
BS: I think that's a false distinction that people make. Gibson doesn't
write what you'd call commercial science fiction but somebody told me
that Gibson is Canada's single most successful writer.
He's made far more money in the past two years than any other writer in
his entire country. So, who's to say?
I have to laugh sometimes at people who think that they're going to
make a lot of money writing science fiction. Like they were really
clever to write science fiction and make maybe as much money as the
butcher or a plumber. In most cases a lot less. But they'll still come
out and say, "Boy! I made 15 grand for a book and isn't that really
something? I'm going to be a leader here in the publishing schedule."
People don't realize how little 15 grand is, especially when you've got
self-employment tax and stuff. For any clever person... that's
starvation wages! If these guys are so smart why didn't they go to law
school? It doesn't make any sense to me.
AW: Look at it from this point of view. It would be infinitely easier,
in some sense, for Gibson to write another Sprawl story which was more
or less the same as the ones that he's written before instead of
working on this project with you. And that's what I mean by writing for
the money, because in a sense it's easy. It doesn't require any further
innovation or originality on his part, but it is guaranteed to sell.
BS: You're guaranteed to make some money in the short term, I suppose,
but if you don't think over the long term what's the use? Think of the
damage Gibson would do to his long-term earning potential if someone
could say "Here he is; he's selling out. He's snoozing in an easy
chair, writing Sprawl Novel 23."
That's absurd! In ten years, Gibson could be a major literary figure.
He doesn't have to settle for being a hack.
AW: I could reel off a list of names....
BS: Those guys are all morons. None of them make Big Money. None of
them make as much money as they could. They've settled for making a
little money for a little effort. There are people in the world who
get a big kick out of it. I just don't see the appeal.
Not only do I not see the appeal, but I don't even see how it makes economic
sense. If you were going to be a sci-fi writer, wouldn't you rather be
like Arthur Clarke, with your own high-tech research camps and movies
made of your books, and your own TV series and stuff? Isn't that game
worth the candle? As opposed to settling for being like somebody with
Ace Books who's bringing out such-and-such number 12 that no sane
person wants to read? You can write for teenagers forever and never put
your brain in gear, but how much better it is to be read by cosmonauts
and to give lectures to UNESCO. It seems to be where all the fun is!
If you want to talk about ambition, you need to talk about real ambition.
Not this penny ante stuff. I don't see where the kick in that is. It
baffles me.
AW: One of the things that struck me as connected between Islands and
Schismatrix was the idea of cultural cycles. You use the word clades in
Schismatrix and I looked it up in three dictionaries and could not find
it. So what the heck are clades? And do you really think that culture
moves in cycles?
BS: Cladistics is a study of clades and it's a taxonomical term. And
clades, in Schismatrix, doesn't really have much to do with culture.
It's got more to do with evolution. A clade is a branching-out of
related daughter species from some earlier evolutionary ancestor. So
one clade is the entirety of related species. There aren't any clades
in Islands in the Net. Islands isn't about big Stapledonian things like
human evolution. Islands is about politics and culture.
AW: You don't see them as parallel? In the sense that they both evolve,
they're both evolutionary structures.
BS: It seems a far-fetched comparison. If you knew more about clades...
Read a book by Freeman Dyson called Disturbing the Universe, which goes
on and on about clades and human evolution, from which I cribbed many
of the best ideas in Schismatrix, then you'd get a much better idea of
what I was trying to get at there.
There's a great Whole Earth Review issue called "Signals" which talks
about this at great length. The common social organization in eighties
culture is the Net, rather than the neighborhood or the village. It's
like the world's one electronic village, so anybody you can reach with
a phone call is really a neighbor of yours. These people tend to accrete
even though they're very distant geographically. Mere acreage doesn't
count for that much anymore. And you see that come up again and again.
It's like there are new tribes, tribes that have electronic boundaries
rather than physical ones or bloodlines. And it's technological but
it's also tied in deeply to the way post-industrial society is
organized. Toffler talks about it a lot -- de-massification he calls
it. As opposed to industrial culture which tends to reduce everyone to
a lower common denominator.
It's like one of those neural nets that organizes itself and then sort
of falls into the proper configuration. You find that happening a lot
in the eighties, that people fall into a configuration and then they
all look around and say "Hey, we're a tribe." That's what happened to me.
In the seventies, I was part of the local tribe -- Turkey City people --
just because we all happened to be here and all became friends.
That had its day and now I'm tied in with people like Gibson, doing a
book with him by modem. He lives hundreds and hundreds of miles from
here; another country for Christ's sake. And yet he's one of my closest
friends and closest collaborator -- the guy I have most in common with.
AW: How did you and Gibson get together?
BS: Oh, he wrote me a fan letter.
AW: Really?
BS: Yeah. It's always a good idea -- you see somebody whose work you
admire, write him a fan letter. Authors love that shit. Sometimes they
complain about it, but they even like the ones that are from people who
are demented and write in crayon. About the only thing that writers
don't like is getting letters from people who say things like "Dear Mr
X. I read your novel about the purple people of Triton and I've talked
to them, too." That sort of thing's bothersome.
I don't think that Robert Heinlein appreciated the fact that Charles
Manson was one of his big fans, but other than that, it's a big kick.
If you want to get in touch with people, you have to reach out. You run
the risk of rejection, but that's part of it, right? What you have to
do; nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Of course, Gibson knew Shirley. And I knew Shirley. And Shirley and I
both knew Steve Brown, the current editor of Science Fiction Eye. It
could have been any number of ways that I could have gotten in touch
with Gibson and sooner or later I'm sure I would have. But as it
happened, he just wrote me a note: "Dear Mr. Sterling. Liked your book."
AW: Which one was it?
BS: It was Involution Ocean. I didn't think of it as being a big deal
at the time; I just said, "How nice. A fan letter," and wrote him back.
Then he started sending me manuscripts and stuff. And once he mentioned
that he'd sold a story, I thought "Oh, boy. An ambitious would-be
writer. Wonder if he's any good?" Then he actually sent me the
manuscript of Burning Chrome and I read it and I immediately realized
"Whoa! We've got a live one here!"
AW: So that's Gibson and Shirley and a few others that were in town.
How did Bruce Sterling become Chairman Bruce? Reading through the first
issue of SF Eye, it's amazing some of the things people say about you.
Maddox just goes on and on during this interview with Gibson.
BS: I'm a "treacherous, crazed Rastafarian"? I "emit ectoplasm"? I can
say why I became Chairman Bruce. The reason I got involved in this was
that I began to take a deeper interest in the things we were doing. I
wrote a fanzine -- I took that upon myself, to pay the postage for it
and edit it and get it out to people -- which just served as the
central info dump for the thinking and criticism we were doing. This
was Cheap Truth. So I was "in command" of the roundtable discussions,
that makes me the chairman, right? I mean, I was the one who decides,
"now X speaks; now let's hear a bit from Y." And I would call people up
and suggest things for them to write. "Look, I'm really interested in
what you did here; can you try to explain that for us?" "How would you
like to write some..."
If somebody called me up and said, "Boy, I just came across this nifty
idea" or "...this great writer" I would urge them to do an article on
it. I controlled the means of information in a little Net, so that made
me the SysOp, the Chairman. Plus, I edited Mirrorshades, which anybody
could have done, I suppose. It was obvious that sooner or later -- and
probably sooner -- somebody was going to do it. And it was a choice
between one of us doing it or leaving it to some genre guru who would
deign to notice us.
I knew that it was going to be necessary to do it, so I appointed
myself. It's not that anybody else was jockeying for the position. At
the time, it didn't look like there was going to be any money
associated with it. Mostly a lot of hassle and work. I did the hassle
and work and it turned out to be a fairly successful collection.
But that's why I'm the Chairman.
AW: Listening to Maddox, the way he says Chairman it's like he means
Chairman Mao. I sort of expect him to get up and start waving "Bruce's
Little Red Book" or something.
BS: Well, you know Maddox. He's a funny guy; he doesn't take this very
seriously. The real Chairman Mao, the Chinese now say that he was
Hitler with a command of the worst aspects of Chinese feudalism. It's
not like my chairmanship gives me any real power or control over what
other writers do. I don't call up Maddox on the phone and say "Tom,
write me X story." That's not my power. I'm not even John Campbell.
He was a guy who really did have dictatorial power and if he decided
that psi powers were for real he could write a lunatic editorial about
it in his magazine and six months later everybody in the field would be
writing about psi powers just like they were a real thing. Or he could
launch Dianetics. He could start pop religions in his magazine. That is
what passes for real power in science fiction, and the stuff I've got
is just a joke essentially.
AW: There seem to be two camps -- one camp says that cyberpunk is a
marketing fad or marketing gimmick. If they're being negative about it,
they claim it's all self-hype. The other camp seems to claim it's
something of an aesthetic movement, some kind of high Art in paperback
covers. It struck me that you have claimed it's both at the same time.
BS: Yeah? There's something peculiar about that? Why can't it be both
at the same time? Art Nouveau was, right? Pre-Raphaelite art was. The
pre-Raphaelites had an ideology and a marketing scheme: they used to
sign everything "P.R.B." -- Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They were the
first group who were really like what you'd call a quote movement
unquote. It's just one of the things that's associated with movements.
Even the pre-Raphaelites, and this is back in the 1850's, had a little
rag that was the center of their ideology. It was called The Germ. It
had maybe thirty copies, something like that.
As far as the marketing aspect of it goes, people don't realize just
how little writers have to do with the marketing of their own books.
Take K. W. Jeter. He's made annoyed comments about cyberpunk in
Interzone and so forth. But at the same time his own book, Glass
Hammer, I remember coming out in the HEB grocery down the street here:
"The Cyberpunk Masterpiece." That was the first time I'd thought things
had gone too far. Not that it was Jeter, but that cyberpunk was being
sold by the HEB.
People are going to call our work cyberpunk until the word ceases to
sell copies! I know that Arbor House is going to call Islands in the
Net cyberpunk, but I don't really know whether it is or not. Obviously
it's a movement novel; it is written with an ideological foundation. I
think that it's a clear progression from my other work, but it's not
written with many of the tag lines that people associate with
cyberpunk; it's not Chandleresque, it's not film noir. The people in it
aren't criminals or lowlifes, they're sort of well- meaning
middle-class liberals more than anything else. So who's to say?
I think it's a science fiction novel. I'm not going to go out of my way
to say "Boy. I write this sub-genre called cyberpunk and that's just
what I do, man" because it's not what I do. I write all kinds of stuff.
I can't help that. About all I can do is not let it get in my face. I'm
going to do what I want.
AW: What criteria do you use when you pick up a piece of science
fiction to say this is more or less cyberpunk?
BS: I don't really do it much any more. I'm not really interested in
the sort of stuff we were writing in '83 and '84. If I pick up a story
and read it and it's got a character in it who's a hustler like Case in
Neuromancer and it's got a lot of cybernetic buzzwords in it and maybe
there's a character who's a mercenary who's dressed in black leather
and has razors under her fingernails, then I identify that as very
Mirrorshades. But I don't write that anymore and I'm not particularly
interested in reading it.
I would read it with glee if it were done as well as Gibson did it, but
I've never seen anyone do it as well as Gibson does it. It already
looks a little dated. They don't realize that the thing about
Neuromancer that made it what it was was that it really just took a big
chunk out of what made 1982 1982. Neuromancer is about the world and
derivative science fiction is about other kinds of science fiction. And
Neuromancer's not really about science fiction; Neuromancer is about
the late twentieth century and the technological milieu.
If I see something that just has key images from cyberpunk, that just
plays pulp writing games with them, that's of no interest to me.
Besides, who's to say? Here's Islands, right? It's going to be marketed
as a cyberpunk book. Suppose it becomes a real big book. Suppose it
sells a lot. Then people are going to read this, many who've never read
cyberpunk before, and they're going to think, "Oh. So this is
cyberpunk. Yes, political, set in the early twenty-first century. It's
about international law and certain concerns and family relationships"
and all the things that Islands is about. And who's to say nay? Who's
going to come and say, "Oh, no. This isn't cyberpunk?" It's got the
word here on it.
I can see if something's good and something's not. That's the criterion
I put on things. There are certain things that the introduction to
Mirrorshades talks about which I think are principles that I think make
science fiction good science fiction. It's got visionary intensity and
carries extrapolation into the fabric of daily life. It's detailed and
intricate. There's a list of five catchwords in there which apply to a
great many science fiction books. And when I see that I think, "Wow!
That's great!"
It's not the business of cyberpunks, or even myself, to go out and set
boundaries; we're in the business of exploding boundaries. We're
interested in InterZones, not in thermos bottles -- isolated things,
ghettos. That doesn't do anything for us. That's not where the action is.
That's why I was excited to go to Japan and talk to their people. They
see it as a different thing over there and, I think, a more accurate
thing. In Tokyo, cyberpunk is an eighties pop culture entity. It's not
something that happens within science fiction. They don't worry "Is
Piers Anthony cyberpunk?" It doesn't occur to them to ask that
question. They can see it happening around them because for them,
Tokyo is part of the Sprawl. They recognize it immediately as
something that speaks to them, that has truth in it. It deals with
their milieu. It's not writing about science fiction, it's writing
about what is happening there.
To me, that's the quill. That's what's worth pursuing. It doesn't do
any good to write work which is more and more theoretically cyberpunk.
There's nothing to be gained by that. It would be a betrayal of
everything the movement represented. It would be a closing of your eyes
and a stopping up of your ears and a turning inward and we just don't
do that; there's just no point.
AW: There's a sort of technology transfer going on here. You see
Gibson's stuff in the manuscripts he sends you and in Cheap Truth and
stuff like that. But it takes two years for that thing to get
published; it comes out it hardback; not a lot of people read it; it
takes another year or two to come out in paperback. Finally, six years
down the road it really has an impact. Your perspective is six years
ahead of the reading public.
BS: Yeah, but I'm talking long term. I'm not saying this is going to
happen tomorrow. I've been writing for ten years. It's why I say,
again and again, look ten years down the road. Ten years down the road
the big four, the gerontocrats of science fiction, are all going to be
dead or in old age homes. It's just a fact.
Look at Locus. Look in any issue of Locus now and you'll see that the
obituary section is huge. A generation is dying, and somebody's going
to replace those people or science fiction is going to cease to exist
as an entity, which I think would be a tragedy because it's needed now
more than it every was. And where are the people to step in? I look
around at my contemporaries and I know who's going to step in. Unless
they're run over by trucks or something, there's nothing that can stop
these people; they're the best.
AW: Beyond the obvious names, who do you think are the names that we
should be watching?
BS: Well, Shepard is a very great writer. He's possessed of enormous
talent. I think he'll go far if he wants to go far. I mean, he could
always quit and become a Nantucket whaler. Who's to say? But guys like
him just don't come along very often.
Blaylock is a writer of enormous gifts. He has the real science fiction
quill, that guy. He dreams SF in his sleep. You just don't get that
combination very often: someone who can really turn a phrase, who can
really see, and yet whose vision is very skewed at the same time.
Science fiction writers walk a tightrope. You have to be crazed enough
to have the mental horsepower to move people, but you can't be so fucked
up that you're unable to write English. Every once in a while a guy comes
along who's really gifted, who has a knockout punch with each fist, and
I think Blaylock is there. Every book of his I've seen gets stronger.
And then there are the people in Mirrorshades. I think Greg Bear is a
writer of very great ability. And he doesn't care to be called a
cyberpunk, so I'm not going to call him one; I don't care. He obviously
has the gift; you just see it in his work. Greg Bear doesn't write
unworthy things. He works.
I think that there are many writers present in science fiction who are
going to have a lot more influence than one might think. Gardner Dozois
is becoming step by step a very powerful editor. He may end up being
the most powerful editor the field has had since Campbell. No one's
stopping in the middle to say "Oh, look at Dozois taking over the field
and shaping it into his own image."
One reason for this lack of notice is that Dozois, unlike Campbell,
doesn't write crazed stupid editorials about Dean drives and how black
people are inferior. If you look, what's happened with Isaac Asimov's --
they gained nine Nebula nominations this year -- that's never happened
before. And if you can see the people who are published in Asimov's,
who are the creme de la creme, really, you can see that Dozois has got
his hands on the rudder and the ailerons there. The man is setting the
pace. I think he's an editor whose influence is going to be great.
I like John Kessel a lot. He doesn't write very often -- he's not
prolific. I don't like all of his work by any means, but I think he's
somebody who understands what's going on in science fiction. He thinks
about things. He's got an influence because he runs Sycamore Hill, the
writers' conference in North Carolina. As a theorist, his work goes
deeper than appearances.
I expect to see -- any minute now -- the group of people who are going
to remove from us the stigma of being Young Writers. The generation
that was born in the 1960's is going to come along very soon. They're
not very visible yet, but the cyberpunks certainly weren't visible
until the eighties and we're mostly the generation born in the late
forties and early fifties.
People call me a young writer, but I'm 34 years old; that's not young.
Ian MacDonald is young; he's 26. I think he's a writer of great
promise. It's hard to say; he's only written one novel, got one
short-story collection out. But his work is very visionary and intense.
I think that careers of science fiction writers tend to follow a
certain slope. A guy who's going to end up being a really powerful and
influential science fiction writer usually starts out writing books
which are very colorful but very disorganized. It takes quite a while
to learn a sense of craft and discipline. When you're young and
energetic, with your head full of visions, you have a hard time
controlling it. But unless you've got that spark at the beginning,
you're never really going to make anything of yourself. This is the
"rough diamond" effect, right? And I see that in Ian MacDonald, so I
have high hopes for him. And not least because he's British and they
really need some good young writers over there.
I hope to see some good stuff out of Japan. The Japanese are now the
second-largest science fiction publishers in the world. The thing
that's scary is that they know everything about us. They know the most
obscure pop bands in Athens, Georgia, and we know nothing about them.
It's all one way, like they're behind one-way glass over there. They
know things about us we don't know about ourselves, like American
marketing. It's a weird thing, but maybe that will be broached; maybe
we'll see some good Japanese science fiction. You can only hope.
I like Karen Joy Fowler a lot, too. And I like Gwyneth Jones. I think
they could go far. I think Karen Fowler's very talented. She's very
gifted; she's like the "big gun" of humanism as far as I'm concerned.
She writes a kind of fiction that, in many ways is my bete noir. She
does things that I ought to really loathe. I have every ideological
reason to hate them and yet I really like them, and I think that's a
sign of a great gift.
Who's to say what's to become of science fiction? It shows every sign
of going on and on, but things could change in a hurry -- one big
economic depression or a sudden breakdown in literary barriers. You
sort of see more and more science fiction encroachment on the
mainstream and it could happen.
OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988
Copyright 1988
by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved
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OtherRealms may not be reproduced in any form without written
permission from Chuq Von Rospach. The electronic edition may be
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