Speaking of the Fantastic III. Darrell Schweitzer

Speaking of the Fantastic III

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Published by Wildside Press LLC

www.wildsidebooks.com

DEDICATION

For Oz Fontecchio,

Patron of the arts,

A faithful and tireless

Friend of science fiction.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

These interviews were previously published as follows, and are reprinted (with minor editing, updating, and textual modifications) by permission of the author:

INTRODUCTION

I’ve been interviewing for most of my life now, and so most of what I have to say about interviewing I have said before, in introductions to books like this one, beginning with the original T.K. Graphics version of SF Voices in 1976. I did my first interview in 1973, which involved a very young Gardner Dozois, an even younger version of myself, and a college chum who came along to make sure the borrowed tape recorder kept working. The result, which appeared underneath a photo of a long-haired Gardner glaring down from a height and alongside (in the other front-page column) a photo of David Bowie at his most androgynous, appeared in 1973 in a Philadelphia “underground” newspaper called The Drummer (as in “a different drummer”) which was given away on campuses and sold on newsstands as a supplement to a larger publication called (I kid you not) The Daily Planet. Yes, like Clark Kent I really was a (presumably) mild-mannered reporter for The Daily Planet.

Even then I instinctively grasped the basics of a good interview, which may be summed up in the following rather run-on sentence: Find someone interesting and articulate, ask just enough questions to get them talking, then point the microphone, shut up, and, oh, by the way, make sure your equipment works.

After that early success I have hopefully improved my technique over the years and learned to ask more intelligent questions, but the basic principle has remained the same. I am not the star of the interview. The interviewee is. Interviews are not news, and therefore do not lose their inherent interest as soon as the forthcoming books the author is talking about have come out, but are instead informal moments in time, captured in context. In an earlier introduction like this I compared it to catching Homer right after he had finished the Iliad and could only say, “I am thinking about doing a sequel.” Or, put it this way. The H. G. Wells of 1898, right after the publication of The War of the Worlds, would have very likely had a very different view of writing, science fiction, and the future of mankind than the Wells of 1940, who would have been a lot gloomier, political, and, very likely, out of touch with the field of literature he had helped to inspire. (But if Wells had held opinions about the John W. Campbell revolution and the work of the early Heinlein, don’t you wish some interviewer had managed to get that on record?)

Certainly many aspects of interviewing today are themselves science fiction by the standards of 1973, when I started. I am writing this introduction on a computer, into a file which consists of the rest of the book, assembled from earlier files, which I have edited into a uniform format. There was a time when all this was done on a manual typewriter, with, at best a bit of literal cut-and-paste involving scissors, glue, and a photocopier.

Today, interviews can be done via e-mail. I have met Zoran Zivkovic since, but when I interviewed him I had not. He was in Belgrade and I was in Philadelphia. We communicated easily and instantaneously, with the result coming out in typesettable form. Now that’s progress. I can barely imagine what it was like before the days of any recording equipment, when the interviewer’s job was to engage his subject in conversation, then hurry to his desk and write down as much as he could remember as quickly as possible. In the old days, most interviewees tended to freeze up at the sight of someone taking their words down in shorthand. Fortunately today most people are used to microphones, and do not lose their spontaneity in front of them. I continue to prefer to interview people in-person, with a tape recorder, but I have learned to do interviews via e-mail instead. It’s not the same as paper correspondence. It is a new skill, which nobody imagined a need for in 1973. If you’re good at it, it can be nearly as spontaneous as speech.

But the principle is still the same. The idea is to get free-flowing conversation which illuminates the subject’s thinking and his work, and which can go off in surprising tangents, quite aside from any pre-written questions. An interview is not a questionnaire, I hasten to add, and hopefully mine do not read like the results of one.

Who are my subjects? I gave some thought to including an extensive introduction to each interview, and maybe a bibliography, but decided against it. This isn’t that kind of reference book. Let’s devote all the space to the interviews themselves. Hopefully, in most cases, a science-fiction writer will know that Geoffrey Landis is a NASA scientist who doubles over as a Hugo-winning science fiction writer, or that Joe Haldeman wrote The Forever War and much else, or that D. G. Compton is the author of Synthajoy and many other celebrated works from around 1970 and who had not been heard from much of late (at least in the science fiction field) when I interviewed him. Robert Sawyer is one of the most successful SF writers of our time. George R. R. Martin has been a fan favorite since he was writing such stories as “A Song for Lya” in Ben Bova’s Analog and has lately achieved bestseller status with an immense fantasy epic that began with A Game of Thrones. Zoran Zivkovic is a leading Serbian fantasist who came to the attention of Anglophone readers in the British magazine Interzone and who has had numerous

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