A Conversation With Nick Sagan
An interview with Kilian Melloy
On writing:
"I think that at its best, writing can be both a
means of entertaining people, a means of exposing people to a different point of view, a means of working out your own
psychological issues or concerns, and a way of figuring out what it is you feel about the world. And a lot of time, I think
people think this is how I am: they think this is my psyche and my word-view. But by writing something you might discover
things about yourself that you never really knew, and hopefully you can do it in a way that is entertaining enough that people
will want to come along for the ride and enjoy the story you are telling -- and at the same time, you are layering it with
levels of social, or ethical, or religious meaning, so that the deeper someone looks into what you're writing, the more
they'll see."
A Conversation With John Saul
An interview with Lisa DuMond
On teenage characters:
"That's the great thing about teenagers as characters: people tend not to take them as seriously as they ought to, so
it's possible for a situation which would be easily controlled if discovered early enough spin completely out of
control simply because one person prefers not to believe what another one is saying. What made Lindsay work so well
was that she had the pressure of the impending move on her; she didn't want to move; and she'd made her antipathy
to the move very clear to everyone; ergo, even when she vanishes, it's easy for people to believe she may simply
have taken off, despite what her mother says."
A Conversation With Robert J. Sawyer -- Part 2
An interview with Steven H Silver
On rereading your work:
"Never! One has to read a book so many times during the writing, revising, editing, copyediting, and proofreading process
that the thought of looking at one of them again has no appeal for me. Actually, I do look forward to reading them again
in my dotage, when I won't remember having written them. My first novel, Golden Fleece, came out in 1990,
when I was 30; I think re-reading it 40 years on, when I'm 70, would be about right for me."
A Conversation With Robert J. Sawyer -- Part 1
An interview with Steven H Silver
On trilogies:
"I still think trilogies are usually bad artistically for SF -- although not as bad as never-ending series. The heart and
soul of drama is closure. Aristotle knew that; all the great writers of the past knew that. A work that doesn't end is
incomplete. Trilogies, of course, do end by definition with the third volume, but often the first and second are
unsatisfactory reading experiences..."
A Conversation With Robert Sawyer
An interview with Kim Fawcett
On the ethical responsibilities of SF:
"We SF writers fill an ecological niche that no one else does. We aren't beholden to industry or government grants. We
can freely speculate on the pluses and minuses of new inventions; in William Gibson's words, we can, and should, be
profoundly ambivalent about new technologies. There is a faction of SF writers that use the genre for pure
technological boosterism; science can do no wrong. There's also another faction that still intones that old B-movie
cliché that "there are some things man was not meant to know." But I think the majority of us fall in the
middle."
A Conversation With Stanley Schmidt
An interview with Jayme Lynn Blaschke
On a definition of SF:
"My definition of science fiction is simply fiction in which some element of speculation plays such an essential and
integral role that it can't be removed without making the story collapse, and in which the author has made a reasonable
effort to make the speculative element as plausible as possible."
A Conversation With Rob Schrab
An interview with David Maddox
On the creation of Scud: the Disposable Assassin:
'This is early 90's and Scud is being thrown around all over the place because of the Gulf War. And I
was like "You know that kind of sounds like a detergent." It was like
something you would buy to clean your tub. I thought, you know, what would be real neat is to have an assassin that had this
pop art detergent box-like look to it. I though what if there was a robot bought out of a vending machine, like a disposable
razor or lighter.'
A Conversation With Karl Schroeder
An interview with Alexander von Thorn
On writing The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Science Fiction:
"What we discovered as we went along is that anything that you might care to know could be
described or explained in less than a hundred words, but there were hundreds and hundreds of different
little items like that, and we had no trouble finding new things to say. But everything was very easy
to explain once we sat down to do it."
A Conversation With Dan Simmons
An interview with Steven H Silver
On an affinity between writing poetry and SF:
"As with poetry, quality
speculative fiction demands great skill with language and invites linguistic invention. As with poetry, good SF delves deep into metaphor
while sliding lightly on the surface of its own joy of telling. As with poetry, quality SF demands a much greater collaboration on the
part of the reader -- a greater sensitivity to detail, word-meaning, texture, and nuance, as well as a greater involvement in ferreting out meaning."
Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman
An interview with David Mathew
On writing together:
"It's like giving each other presents. We're dying to see more of this. When you write alone you can only do it for
yourself, but because there are two of us, if I come home from work and she hands me two pages, it's a wonderful
gift. It's almost more wonderful than being handed a Scotch. And then I'll take the two pages and rewrite it or
something, and it goes back and forth until we literally don't know anymore who has written each scene. To me it seems to go faster."
A Conversation With Michael Marshall Smith
An interview with David Mathew
On making the first sale:
"The problem with 'success', to the very limited degree to which I have achieved it, is that as soon as it's
happened, it's gone -- in the sense that the goal posts move. I can remember how I felt the first time I
sold a short story: overjoyed, gob-smacked, like a new life had opened in front of me. Now, though it's
still a nice feeling, it's not the same."
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A Conversation With Michael Marshall Smith
An interview with Duane Swierczynski
On Y2K:
"I think that, if anything, it
demonstrates an interesting human need to live in a cyclic fashion. We need our ups and
downs. It used to be the coming of the seasons and the harvest, but now that we can buy strawberries
regardless of the time of year, I guess we are looking for other cycles to worry about -- and the
passing of a millennium is a nice big one."
Allen Steele
Part 2 of an interview with Steven H Silver
At Windycon XXV, Steven sat down with guest of honor Allen Steele to
discuss his books, small presses and winning two Hugo Awards. Allen Steele
specializes in writing stories set in the near future, so far in
near Earth space, although he has gone as far afield as Mars, the asteroid belt and Jupiter.
Allen Steele
Part 1 of an interview with Steven H Silver
At Windycon XXV, Steven sat down with guest of honor Allen Steele to
discuss his books, small presses and winning two Hugo Awards. Allen Steele
specializes in writing stories set in the near future, so far in
near Earth space, although he has gone as far afield as Mars, the asteroid belt and Jupiter.
A Conversation With Neal Stephenson
An interview with Catherine Asaro
On his book title Cryptonomicon::
"We wanted a word to catch attention, a one word title. The name is fictitious, the name of a book in the
story. People keep expanding this book with their knowledge about cryptology, until it contains everything
known about the subject. I liked the word Crypt, so I thought of Cryptonomicon. I liked what it
evoked. Then I heard that a document existed on the web called the Cryptonomicon. As it turns out,
it was actually Cyphernomicon, an excellent site by Tim May for cypherpunks."
Bruce Sterling
An interview with Thomas Myer
Bruce Sterling chatted with Thomas about cyberpunk, the 19th Century,
government-sponsored orgies during the Roman Empire, and technology in
general -- all this after a two-hour session in which he talked in front
of two dozen fans about his new novel, Holy Fire, from Bantam Spectra...
A Conversation With James Stevens-Arce
An interview with Lisa DuMond
On any vehement feedback for Soulsaver:
"None hanging me in effigy, oddly enough. I say "oddly" because I had been concerned that some readers might
mistakenly think the novel attacks religion, when, if it attacks anything, it's those who use -- and
abuse -- religion to further their own agendas.
But all I've received so far have been positive responses to the book as you can see in the
comments that have come in via e-mail..."
A Conversation With Matthew Woodring Stover
Part 2 of an interview with Gabriel Chouinard
On literary themes:
"One of the primary themes of 20th Century literature has been the way the world -- society, reality, what
you will -- inevitably erodes our hopes and dreams; there is volume after volume about the death of
everything that's fun about being human. There has been a time when a story could not be considered
serious literature unless its protagonist is crushed by the futility of existence -- the existential void --
figuratively, if not literally."
A Conversation With Matthew Woodring Stover
An interview with Gabriel Chouinard
On good vs. evil:
"I know it's sometimes hard for people to get their minds around, but the whole concept of
the Good/Evil duality was, essentially, invented circa 600 BCE in Persia. You'll discover
that evil qua Evil does not even appear in the Old Testament of the Bible until the
Prophets -- the books that were written after the Persian Captivity. It doesn't appear in the
Illiad, or the Odyssey, or any work by Sophocles, Euripides, or Aeschylus."
Jonathan Strahan: The Iron Man of Anthologists
An interview with Jeff VanderMeer
On trends in short fiction:
"Well, I'd first stress that this is an incredible time for short fiction in the genre. Even in a bad year, there's
more terrific fiction than any one person can keep possibly read. There are two trends that I do see, though. For
whatever reason, stories seem to be getting longer. Ideas that suit a short-short are slipping out to short story
length, short stories tend to lengthen to novelettes, and novelettes are bloating out to novellas. I'm not sure
why this is the case. I've wondered if it's a side effect of online publishing, if it's a general loss of knowledge
of how to structure stories, a decline in editorship, or even a change in the kind of stories writers are attempting."
A Conversation With Victoria Strauss
An interview with Cindy Lynn Speer
On Writer Beware web site:
"In addition to maintaining the website (which is updated at least quarterly with new information and links), we collect
complaints and documentation on questionable agents, publishers and others. Right now we have files on more than 350 agents,
nearly 200 publishers, and assorted editors, contests, and services. It's the largest and most complete database of its kind in
the world, and we use it to provide information not just to writers who contact us with questions (we get upwards of 50 letters
a week), but to law enforcement officials, with whom we're currently at work on several ongoing investigations."
A Conversation With Michael Swanwick
An interview with Lou Anders
On his love of dinosaurs:
"I loved dinosaurs from the time I was able to shove a plastic
one into my mouth. My actually writing about them began in 1998 in
Dinofest in Philadelphia. Dinofest is the World's
Fair of dinosaurs. It is held periodically in major cities around the world.
Dozens of enormous skeletons, robot dinosaurs, hundreds of genuine dinosaur
eggs, a world class dinosaur art show featuring almost every dinosaur artist
you've ever heard of, chunks of amber bigger than your head. It's a toy store for the mind."
A Conversation With Caitlin Sweet
An interview with Donna McMahon
On her influences:
"Lloyd Alexander and Ursula K. Le Guin and Alan Garner really defined my sense of what fantasy can do. It can be
profound and moral -- without moralizing -- and full of wonder."
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