Four Arms (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} vakratunda) wrote,@ 2009-01-07 04:38:00 |
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Gene Wolfe
Up for a Nebula again.
From last New Year's Eve's Eve interview:
---
My great theme is memory. I’m rarely aware of that as I write, but I realize it as I read. Another theme is reality. A good many writers are writing propaganda. I don’t do that. I know that not all politicians are crooked. I know that some soldiers are brutal criminals, but also that most are not even close to that. I have been accused of writing only good and bad women, but that is because those are the only kinds I’ve ever met.
There is nothing in my work that readers will find nowhere else, although I wish there were. I try to serve good, honest writing. I make the hot stuff hot and the cold stuff cold – or try to. A great many other writers are doing the same thing.
---
How has sf changed? The giants are gone. When I started writing, Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke were all producing. You have to have lived in both periods to understand what an enormous difference they made. Fantasy has lost Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. The Harry Potter books are good, but they are YA. Neil Gaiman is our best fantasist and is giving us wonderful books and stories. Another giant has arrived, which may be why fantasy feels so much healthier now.
Both science fiction and fantasy have value, for the present and for the future. It’s important that they be there – and that they be good, and thus read by as many as possible.
The interesting point is that fantasy is very, very old and SF a stripling. The oldest known fiction is fantasy, I believe. The first great fantasy, GILGAMESH, comes to us from the dawn of civilization. Fantasy assures us (quite truthfully) that the universe is inconceivably wide and wild. Once I wrote a poem about a man who lived on an island whose population believed it to be the only place. He walks around the island, and from a lonely beach sees another island.
Fantasy is that walk. “Things could be different,” says fantasy. “They could be very, very different just over that hill. Have hope.”
SF assures (quite truthfully) that they will be. “They may be better,” says SF, “or they may be worse. But they will not be like this.”
.
Up for a Nebula again.
From last New Year's Eve's Eve interview:
---
My great theme is memory. I’m rarely aware of that as I write, but I realize it as I read. Another theme is reality. A good many writers are writing propaganda. I don’t do that. I know that not all politicians are crooked. I know that some soldiers are brutal criminals, but also that most are not even close to that. I have been accused of writing only good and bad women, but that is because those are the only kinds I’ve ever met.
There is nothing in my work that readers will find nowhere else, although I wish there were. I try to serve good, honest writing. I make the hot stuff hot and the cold stuff cold – or try to. A great many other writers are doing the same thing.
---
How has sf changed? The giants are gone. When I started writing, Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke were all producing. You have to have lived in both periods to understand what an enormous difference they made. Fantasy has lost Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. The Harry Potter books are good, but they are YA. Neil Gaiman is our best fantasist and is giving us wonderful books and stories. Another giant has arrived, which may be why fantasy feels so much healthier now.
Both science fiction and fantasy have value, for the present and for the future. It’s important that they be there – and that they be good, and thus read by as many as possible.
The interesting point is that fantasy is very, very old and SF a stripling. The oldest known fiction is fantasy, I believe. The first great fantasy, GILGAMESH, comes to us from the dawn of civilization. Fantasy assures us (quite truthfully) that the universe is inconceivably wide and wild. Once I wrote a poem about a man who lived on an island whose population believed it to be the only place. He walks around the island, and from a lonely beach sees another island.
Fantasy is that walk. “Things could be different,” says fantasy. “They could be very, very different just over that hill. Have hope.”
SF assures (quite truthfully) that they will be. “They may be better,” says SF, “or they may be worse. But they will not be like this.”
.
