Do you regard the fact that SF is still a commercially viable literature a help or a hindrance?
It doesn’t matter a lot. I liked it better before publishers didn’t know what sold. There was a good patch that lasted into the 1980s even, when publishers were so uncertain about what the public liked that they were willing to give almost anything a go. By the 1990s, they’d worked out what sold and what didn’t, and you saw a slowing down of interesting offbeat material and a tendency for categories and sub-categories of generic stuff to become the norm.
I think it gets harder and harder to sell new stuff—stuff that breaks conventions —because now publishers and booksellers “know the market” and know what will sell (i.e., what did sell). So the chances of selling an offbeat novel masquerading in a commercial form get slimmer all the time.
I liked SF precisely for that potential for masquerade— avant-garde pretending to be space opera …
Ever get through The Faerie Queene? Ulysses?
Yes. Gloriana riffed off The Faerie Queene. Ulysses is best enjoyed when read aloud, as is Proust. But if you can read Pamela by Richardson or One of Our Conquerors by Meredith, you can probably read anything. It’s books like Dune or Lord of the Rings that I find almost unreadable.
You are one of SF’s most “literary” writers, and at the same time a militant populist in literature, opposed to high-canon thinking. How do you reconcile those roles?
By demonstration.
An innovative artist must create his own audience as he goes. Do you see yourself as an educator or an entertainer? (“Both” is a cheat.)
Both. I have been both most of my life. I’ve had magazines in which I could present arguments, publish examples. I used to say that the whole New Worlds thing was designed to create an audience for the kind of stuff that Ballard, myself, and others wanted to write.
I think we did that.
My entertainments always contain some sort of confrontational elements; my more confrontational stories have large elements of comedy in particular, and I’d say that was reasonably entertaining.
What do you think of McEwan? Austen? Wells?
McEwan, who is vaguely interesting for his subject matter, tends to dodge the issues like much middlebrow fiction and can be a bloody awful writer. As I can be. Austen’s a joy.
Wells is brilliant, often irritating. I have pretty much an entire collection of Wells, most of them firsts and in the originalmagazines from The Time Machine on. I have all of Austen in a nice edition. I have no McEwan, Amis (fils or père), and no Rushdie. I have all of Elizabeth Bowen, Angus Wilson, Colette, and plenty of Elizabeth Taylor, Rose MacAulay, and lots of Edwardian realists; all of Meredith, Eliot, Dickens; all of Stevenson, Conrad, lots of Ford Maddox Ford, Jack London, Howells, Harte, Twain, California writers who could listen to the eloquence of the streets; a fair amount of Saul Bellow, and a bunch of contemporary writers. Today’s English pantheon is pretty miserable in comparison.
You once said that your first approach to SF was a determination not to be marginalized. Was that the idea behind New Worlds? Did it work?
To a degree. I’m far less marginalized in the UK, I think, where a lot more of my non-generic fiction has been published, won prizes and so forth. I get lengthy reviews for books that aren’t presented as generic. I’m certainly not marginalized in that sense.
My first hardcovers in England generally got good reviews. Behold the Man and The Final Programme weren’t reviewed as genre fiction. Only with the flood of fantasy paperbacks did people begin to get confused, I think. But Gloriana was extensively reviewed as non-generic.
I tend to get treated according to the level of ambition people see in my books. I can be included, for instance, in a Times list of the fifty best writers since the end of World War II but still condescended to as some kind of literary barbarian by academics unfamiliar with my stuff. I’m comfortable with that.
I think I make some critics and academics a bit uneasy. If you look at a copy of New Worlds from 1967 on you’ll see that a general audience is consistently addressed. I wouldn’t let contributors address the “SF field.” Reviewers reviewed Ballard and Borges together, but had to address the general reader. We never spoke of that “field” in which I always imagined a bunch of sheep chewing and rechewing the same grass.
Many readers didn’t know New Worlds had ever been a genre magazine. We were accepted almost from the start as a literary magazine. Ballard, Aldiss, Disch, and myself were frequently on radio and TV speaking for what the critics termed “the new SF.” An anthology was prepared with this name. It attracted a wide readership amongst what you could call the English intelligentsia, particularly those who had liked, say, Galaxy, but needed something a bit posher in appearance to legitimize their enthusiasm.
We were fashionable in the 1960s the way the pop artists (some of whom were featured in New Worlds) and modern poets were fashionable. It was strange to come to the United States and find science fiction still marginalized, still condescended to. Snobbery seems much stronger in the United States, especially in New York.
But it’s the same with rock and roll, I think. In the UK rock and SF were often linked —lots of musicians read SF, some writers performed in bands. I think we can see a major improvement even in America now, though. Writers like Michael Chabon have done much to force snobs to revalue—though I notice he’s been attacked here for his enthusiasm for generic fiction.
I sometimes think America is now the old World as far as the arts and politics and social ideas are concerned.
Did you line edit at New Worlds?
Not really. There’s a different approach in the UK and the United States, I think. American editing tends to come out of the newspaper tradition and seems excessive to me. If we had a problem I’d usually xerox the page or pages in question and underline queries to see what the author felt.
A curmudgeon (MM) once said that today’s SF had gotten too sophisticated to take chances. Do you still make that charge?
Well, I always drew my inspiration from pulp and never much liked the movement to make SF “respectable” (whichmight seem odd, reading the above). I hated that as much as I hated the movement to make black people whiter. My attitude was “like this or prove yourself a backward idiot.”
So if we’re talking about sophistication as respectability, I have to say it makes me miserable. The more invisible you are, the more chances you feel able to take. Rock ‘n’ roll, SF, and comics always show this, I think. Most artistic innovation comes through popular media or at least through obscure media. I chose SF and R&R precisely because there was no one looking over your shoulder when you did it—no critical magazines to study it.
Not when I started, anyway. There was just Crawdaddy.
You once suggested that anyone who wants to write fantasy should quit reading your stuff and read Mervyn Peake instead. Does that career plan still hold?
I didn’t say Peake in particular, but yes, it still holds. If you want to write SF/fantasy, read everything but those genres. Peake is in many ways more in the absurdist tradition I’ve always liked—Peacock, Jarry, Firbank, Vian, Peake. Even William Burroughs is an absurdist first, I think.
You’re a musician as well as a writer. Do you still play? What? What was the state of popular music in England in the 1960s? Did “modern” (Miles, Monk, Mingus) jazz play a role in your postmodern liberation, or was it all rock?
It was all rock and modern composers like Messiaen. In the ‘60s it was still possible not to have to book tickets for Schoenberg, he was so unpopular. This changed during that decade.
I didn’t much care for jazz after a brief craze for it in the ‘50s, when in Paris you could hear a dozen greats in bars up and down one tiny street. Now I appreciate it much more and like it better. My tastes have broadened. I used to think only string quartets were worth listening to.
SF has been swamped by Fantasy. Are you partly to blame for that or do your consider your work a counterforce?
Now I still sell pretty well, but it seems to be more to fantasy readers who don’t much like Tolkien (or at least his clones).
The change in the United States came really when Donald Wollheim pirated the Lord of the Rings books and also found that A Princess of Mars wasn’t in copyright. Larry Shaw at Lancer liked Jack Vance and me and was the first to publish my fantasy in the United States. I think my stuff probably is a counterforce at some level.
I don’t think I’m to blame for Prof. T. My influences among modern writers were almost wholly American—Poul Anderson, Sprague de Camp, Fritz Leiber, C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance.
Tolkien question here. The answer is “certainly. “ You provide the question.
Is Tolkien a sentimentalist who, like many writers (Sherriff, Deeping, etc.) emerging from World War I needed to mystify and sentimentalize that conflict and/or their part in it. To make “sacrifice” noble. Are you sympathetic to but irritated by such attitudes which spilled over into the English middle-class sensibility so that they lasted (via BBC drama, for instance) long after the end of World War II?
Rowling question here. The answer is “perhaps. “ You provide the question.
Has Rowling discovered a strategy for continuing that especially English genre, the public school story (Thomas Hughes, Talbot Baines Reade, Charles Hamilton, and many others), thus successfully continuing to spread certain English class attitudes well into the 21st century and across the world?
Do you wear a hat when you write? Do you have a regular work regimen? Coffee or tea?
I wear different hats. Currently I’m wearing a FLASH baseball cap for my Doctor Who novel. I prefer to work outside whenever possible and then I wear a wide-brimmed Panama.
Do you stay in touch with the old New Worlds crowd (Sallis, Aldiss, Platt, Spinrad, Malzberg, etc.)? Why are they so grumpy?
Are they? I’m scarcely in touch with anyone but Aldiss and Spinrad, and they seem actually less grumpy on most issues than they were in the ‘60s. They were always fairly confrontational by nature, as I am.
I grumpily want to know why Malzberg pinched the title of my novel Breakfast in the Ruins. I’m not in touch with him at all or I’d ask him myself. Maybe they’re grumpy because all their bloody mates are dying. That pisses me off too.
Why was the New Wave such a Guy Thing? Or was it?
Not for want of trying to publish women. We published as many women as we could encourage—Emshwiller, Arnason, Sargent, Zoline, Castell (Vivienne Young in art), and of course Hilary Bailey. Would you count Doris Lessing?
You have to publish by example, if possible, and I know we tried to publish women, but they were thin on the ground. Judith Merril was strongly associated with the so-called New Wave. Much of the fiction I write and we published was decidedly pro-women in a way that a lot of guy fiction (the Beats, for instance) was not.
Precisely the reason I can’t enjoy either Amis. There’s always been a distinct smell of the saloon bar in much fiction. Could be why my “default” writer, the one I always turn to when I can’t think of anyone else to read, is Elizabeth Bowen (especially Death of the Heart).
My close friend Andrea Dworkin loved SF and wrote some, and we sometimes discussed this. She thought there were a lot more women published now because women don’t tend to submit work where they think it isn’t wanted. Given that Joanna Russ, Ursula Le Guin, and others are associated with the so-called New Wave, I’m not sure that it was such a guy thing!
I always wanted something ambitious from Joanna.
Disch became somewhat bitter toward SF. In your Humble Opinion, was this critical or personal?
Tom was always a bit confused on this issue. He wanted literary respectability more than any other author I knew and used to say “The New Yorker can smell the SF on me.” (I just wrote a story touching on this, called “Stories” for an anthology called Stories.)
Once, when I got a full-page review in the Times Literary Supplement praising a book, Tom called me and said, “Congratulations. You’ve won!” I was baffled.
Tom was competitive, but he wanted his success to come from conventional institutions. He was far more a modern than a postmodern. He liked to think of himself as Henry James rather than Henry Kuttner. Yet he could be very generous and encouraging to new writers of SF.
He was always a snob, but never enough to hang out happily with other snobs. He was unhappy in New York, which is probably the snottiest town in the world, yet he hung on therewishing to be accepted—or accepted more.
That wasn’t why he killed himself, though, I think. Essentially he killed himself because his partner Charles Naylor had died, leaving him terribly alone.
I was very fond of Charlie, but he was a worse snob than Tom in some ways, though much more “liberal” in some ways (anti-Jewish attitudes aside).
Unlike, say, Ballard who became increasingly radical into old age, Tom became increasingly reactionary until even the Weekly Standard (for which he wrote regularly) found some of his stuff went too far.
Is England or the United States more receptive to (or at least forgiving of) satire?
The tradition seems to have remained healthier in the UK than in the U.S., though that said, there are some fine American satirists.
I don’t know. Americans seem to place a higher value on politesse than the British. We’re far more savage toward public figures. This is odd since Free Speech isn’t in our Bill of Rights.
I always have found it strange that Americans have to signal irony or humour in general by adding “joke” at the end of whatever they’ve said. Or by signalling quote marks. I’ve found I have to do it too sometimes or people take what I’ve said seriously. This spelling out of an ironic or sarcastic remark doesn’t happen in England or France.
What do you read for fun?
Sexton Blake “story papers” (equivalent of dime novels) and others from between the wars. P. G. Wodehouse and a whole bunch of Edwardian comic/realist writers like Zangwill, Pett Ridge, Barry Paine, F. Anstey, Jerome K. Jerome. Scott, Q, Stevenson.
Do you read or write poetry?
Yes. Most of the poetry in my fiction, though, is parody (as in “Ernest Wheldrake,” Swinburne’s pseudonym under which he attacked his own work, as “Colvin” attacked mine). Otherwise I’m a crap poet.
You have written series novels, standalones, and short stories. What do you think is the distinction between short story writers and novelists?
Do you want me to be facetious? I suspect short story writers are temperamentally less patient than novelists.
Do you ever outline? Do you work from plot or character?
Not an outline as such, though I had to do one for the BBC when writing the Doctor Who novel they commissioned. I make extensive notes and then hardly ever refer to them. I tend to work from character, even with my fantasy novels. Writing Doctor Who was awkward in this respect since there’s only so much you can do to work up his character.
Have you ever written a conventional screenplay? Do you like the form? (I do.)
I wrote one for The Land That Time Forgot and rewrote The Final Programme, and I’ve written a few that were never made. Usually I don’t enjoy working with directors, though.
I’m used to doing a story and then standing or falling by it, whereas I get frustrated when I finish a job and someone comes along to tell me it’s not quite right (“It’s wonderful, Michael. There are just a few changes we thought of …”) My theory is that having to work this way didn’t help Fitzgerald or Faulkner stay (or even get) on the wagon. I’d be a drunk in similar circumstances.
The money’s good but there’s a reason for that.
Your narratives are known for their velocity. Does this mean they are speedy to write as well?
I used to feel, as a journalist, that over three days on a book was uneconomical, so all my fantasies took three days to write. I’d support myself with journalism. Behold the Man took five days. The Final Programme took ten. The longest it took me to write a book before Byzantium Endures was six weeks (Gloriana). Byzantium took six months.
These days it can take maybe a month for a first draft of a fantasy, with about two weeks for revision. Until Byzantium I rarely did more than one draft.
You describe yourself as an anarchist rather than a Marxist. What does this mean politically? Personally? Artistically?
It’s a philosophical/moral position from which I can easily make quick decisions of pretty much every kind. My anarchism informs my pro-feminism, for instance.
I happen to believe as a writer that words are action and that we have to be able to stand by our actions and accept any consequences of our actions.
Therefore if someone tells me they have been, for example, raped by someone claiming to have been encouraged by my work, I feel I have to examine that work to see if it can’t be changed.
If someone tells me they hate or are dissatisfied by a book of mine, I tend to send them their money back.
I modified the Cornelius books as I went along because too many young men were poncing about thinking it was cool to pose around being “amoral.” Like many writers attracted to SF, I’m intensely moralistic.
What has living in the United States brought to your work as an artist?
A little more understanding of a country which is often baffling to Europeans because they feel it should be a betterversion of Europe—certainly better than the Europe settlers left behind. That it is in several ways a worse version is a bit of a shock to us.
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