Speaking of the Fantastic III. Брайан Герберт

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 books published in English since, mostly by small presses. He is a winner of the World Fantasy Award. And so on. If there really is somebody here you have not heard of, I hope it doesn’t seem too haughty of me to say that’s why God made Wikipedia. That is another sign of the modern age, right along with the fact that many of these interviews were first published on the Internet and have never actually been in physical print before. A book like this doesn’t need quite as much introductory apparatus as it used to.

      So let’s get on with it. I always think of these collections as a compilation from my talk show. Here are some of my best recent episodes.

      Darrell Schweitzer

      January 19, 2011

      GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

      Q: You’ve made quite a transition from being an Analog writer to the writer of a multi-volume epic fantasy? Is this something you planned or even expected? I am sure there are some guys in the hard-science camp who are grumbling that George Martin is this traitor to the cause.... Have you given this much thought?

      Martin: I’ve had an occasional review which says that I’ve changed from one thing to another, but it’s really a misperception. Oddly enough, I’ve been through it before, because when I wrote Fevre Dream in 1982 I got a lot of stuff about how I’d changed from being a science fiction writer to a horror writer at that time. Now it’s a high fantasy writer.

      The truth is that if you go back and look at my career, you’ll see that I have written in all these genres and sub-genres since the very beginning. My first story was a science fiction story in Galaxy, my first professional sale. But my second professional sale was a ghost story in Fantastic. I published a couple epic fantasy short stories in Fantastic during the 1970s as well, back when Ted White was the editor, as well as the stories in Analog. The stories in Analog got more attention, but the other stuff was there from the beginning.

      I read all this stuff growing up and I read it pretty much interchangeably. I never made these distinctions between genre. I read H. P. Lovecraft. I read Robert E. Howard and I read Tolkien, and of course I read Robert A. Heinlein and Eric Frank Russell and Andre Norton; so I have always loved all three genres of science fiction and horror and fantasy, and have moved between them pretty freely. I don’t think I’ve gone anywhere. I am in the middle of this very large project right now, which is epic fantasy, but when I am done with it, the next book, whenever that comes, could be science fiction or horror or even something else entirely. A mystery novel. Who knows? I just tell the stories that I want to tell.

      Q: Do you find that the writing or the conception different if it’s going to be science fiction, or not? Is the imaginative process any different?

      Martin: No, it’s not different at all for me. I think that for science fiction, fantasy, and even horror to some extent, the differences are skin-deep. I know there is an element of the field, particularly in science fiction, who feel that the differences are very profound, but I do not agree with that analysis. I think for me it is a matter of the furnishings. I have talked about that in some of my guest of honor speeches. An elf or an alien may in some ways fulfill the same function, as a literary trope. It’s almost a matter of flavor. The ice cream can be chocolate or it can be strawberry, but it’s still ice cream. The real differences, to my mind, is between romantic fiction, which all these genres are a part of, and mimetic fiction, or naturalistic fiction.

      Q: There was a Heinlein argument that science fiction is a form of realism. Did he know what he was talking about?

      Martin: I don’t think so. [Laughs.] And Heinlein wrote fantasy himself, for that matter, from time to time, not very much of it; but he was perfectly capable of doing something like “Magic Incorporated,” or even Glory Road, which has many of the trappings of a fantasy within a science fiction framework.

      Q: This raises a point which others have raised before, that science fiction is a kind of language. You can have a fantasy novel within a science-fiction framework, as oposed to a fantasy novel not within a science-fiction framework. This implies a science-fiction discourse which can handle fantasy material. Wasn’t that the whole point of the Unknown Worlds school, fantasy written as if it were science fiction?

      Martin: Yes, and Unknown Worlds was a particular subset of fantasy, driven, I think, by Campbell’s very deep rationalism, his desire to make magic obey the laws that engineering might obey. So you could discover the seven principles of magic and apply them. To my mind the ultimate Unknown Worlds stories were always the Incomplete Enchanter stories—the Harold Shea stories—by Pratt and de Camp. Harold Shea is always going into these worlds, and there is magic at work, but it’s not mysterious. It is strange to him at first, but when he works out the underlying principles, he can easily become a magician, because he is basically an engineer. That was an amusing and, I think, an original take on it all at the time, in the ’30s and ’40s, but it’s certainly not my take. I find myself more in sympathy with the way Tolkien handles magic. I think if you’re going to do magic, it loses its magical qualities if it becomes nothing more than an alternate kind of science. It is more effective if it is something profoundly unknowable and wondrous, and something that can take your breath away.

      Q: It’s a matter of control. If you can retro-engineer Sauron’s ring, it isn’t as magical anymore. It’s a matter of the characters getting control of the material, as opposed to being in a situation or universe where this is not really possible.

      Martin: Yes. That’s certainly part of it. Understanding is part of it. Of course you can go to the horror slant, too, with Lovecraft and his suggestion that if we understood some of these things, they would drive us mad, because the truths are too profoundly disturbing in what they tell us about the hostile or inimical nature of the universe or the strange and arcane forces that surround us.

      Q: Do you find yourself СКАЧАТЬ