Speaking of the Fantastic III. Брайан Герберт

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      BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY DARRELL SCHWEITZER

      Conan’s World and Robert E. Howard

      Deadly Things: A Collection of Mysterious Tales

      Exploring Fantasy Worlds

      The Fantastic Horizon: Essays and Reviews

      Ghosts of Past and Future: Selected Poetry

      The Robert E. Howard Reader

      Speaking of Horror II

      Speaking of the Fantastic III: Interviews with Science Fiction Writers

      SPEAKING OF THE FANTASTIC III

      INTERVIEWS WITH SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS

      DARRELL SCHWEITZER

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2012 by Darrell Schweitzer

      I.O. Evans Studies in the

      Philosophy and Criticism of Literature

      ISSN 0271-9061

      Number Fifty-Seven

      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:

      George R. R. Martin originally appeared in Weird Tales #344, April-May 2007. Copyright © 2007 by Wildside Press. Copyright © 2012 by Darrell Schweitzer.

      James Morrow originally appeared in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show #7, January 2008. Copyright © 2008, 2012 by Darrell Schweitzer.

      Jack Dann originally appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction #212, April 2006. Copyright © 2006 by Dragon Press. Copyright © 2012 by Darrell Schweitzer.

      Geoffrey A. Landis originally appeared in Science Fiction Chronicle #245, March 2004. Copyright © 2004, 2012 by Darrell Schweitzer.

      Joe W. Haldeman originally appeared in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show #12, May 2009. Copyright © 2009, 2012 by Darrell Schweitzer.

      Zoran Zivkovic originally appeared in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show #8, April 2008. Copyright © 2008, 2012 by Darrell Schweitzer.

      Esther Friesner originally appeared in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show #9, July 2008. Copyright © 2008, 2012 by Darrell Schweitzer.

      Kristine Kathryn Rusch originally appeared on the DNA Publications website in 2009. Copyright © 2009, 2012 by Darrell Schweitzer.

      Harry Turtledove originally appeared in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show #10, December 2008. Copyright © 2008, 2012 by Darrell Schweitzer.

      Gregory Frost originally appeared in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show #13, July 2009. Copyright © 2009, 2012 by Darrell Schweitzer.

      Tom Purdom originally appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction #208, December 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Dragon Press. Copyright © 2005, 2012 by Darrell Schweitzer.

      D. G. Compton originally appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction #232, December 2007. Copyright © 2007 by Dragon Press. Copyright © 2012 by Darrell Schweitzer.

      Robert J. Sawyer originally appeared in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show #6, October 2007. Copyright © 2007, 2012 by Darrell Schweitzer.

      Charles Stross originally appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction, #248, April 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Dragon Press. Copyright © 2009, 2012 by Darrell Schweitzer.

      Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson originally appeared in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show #14, September 2009. Copyright © 2009, 2012 by Darrell Schweitzer.

      Howard Waldrop originally appeared in Postscripts #7, Summer 2006. Copyright © 2006, 2012 by Darrell Schweitzer.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ