In case you missed Kim Stanley Robinson‘s appearance in Second Life, you can hear the man himself being interviewed by fellow writer James Patrick Kelly on a special episode of Mur Lafferty’s I Should Be Writing podcast.
Topics include the Science in the Capitol series, the Clarion Workshop (at which Robinson is teaching this year), and why he’s not been writing much short fiction recently. [Image from Wikipedia]
Novelist, pundit, design theorist and iconoclast – Bruce Sterling is all of these and more, and is one of the people that the Futurismic project has always looked to for inspiration.
Sterling has a new novel called Caryatids out at the end of February, the writing of which has somehow been shoehorned in between him bouncing around Europe, lecturing on design theory and keeping an eye on the maelstrom of global multimedia culture and politics.
He was good enough to cave into the pestering of this irredeemable fanboy and answer some questions about the new novel, the closing of the Viridian Green project and the relentless demise of science fiction print media. Continue reading INTERVIEW: BRUCE STERLING on Caryatids, Viridian and the death of print
The charming, modest and erudite Geoff Ryman – author of Air, The Child Garden and more, plus the progenitor of the still-divisive Mundane SF manifesto – gets his turn in the interview hotseat over at the Nebula Awards website. Here he is explaining what inspired that controversial manifesto:
In 2002 Clarion I saw that a whole kind of SF writer, those whose work was based on science, were increasingly outside the SF and fantasy culture. I wanted to help get them published and I very suddenly found myself writing The Mundane Manifesto, based on some of the things the guys (and they were guys) had said. Both about old tropes driving out the new, and also an avoidance of the coming crunch in terms of oil, global warming, overpopulation, and development economics.
Some interesting stuff there, including an admission that Ryman himself may not have been the ideal figurehead for the subgenre. Go read. [photo by Danacea]
Regular readers (including, embarrassingly enough, The Man Himself) will be aware of my status as a card-carrying Bruce Sterling fan-boy, but as it’s a fandom I know many Futurismic readers share I feel I can more than justify linking to a recent interview with Sterling conducted by David de Beer at the Nebula Awards website.
As usual, you get both sides of the Sterling coin: the lengthy and discursive answers:
The Commercial vs the Artistic in writing – is there a genuine difference between these two philosophies or are they artifical attributes? Are they in opposition, and if so, can they meet?
Well, I hang out a lot in countries where the creatives write in minority languages, and really, that’s just not an issue for them. They know what American commercial writing looks like, but they themselves don’t HAVE any “commerce.” There aren’t enough potential readers to establish a market.
What they DO commonly have is “political writing,” the kind of stuff that gets your fingertips broken by the secret police. So: take a guy like recent Nobel-Prize winner Orhan Pamuk — super-popular worldwide, a real old-school deep-thinking artsy literatus, and the crazy-fascist wing of the Turkish secret police are trying hard to kill him. Now that guy is a writer’s writer. He’s got all those supposed oppositions stuffed into one refugee valise. You know, fretting about a commercial sell-out is the least of Orhan’s problems.
Furthermore, it’s dead obvious that the writing problems that matter in America now are political rather than “commercial” or “artistic”. America’s suffering a Civil Cold War. Or at least, they were until the Right’s culture-warriors started losing it.
And the short sharp punches-in-the-nose:
Electronic vs Print publishing – any thoughts on the matter?
You should talk to my colleagues in newspapers. If you can find any newspapers left.
Go read – even if you’re not a fan of his fiction, Sterling keeps an ear to the ground of reality better than any sf writer of his generation, and that alone makes him worth paying attention to.
We like to keep an eye on the progress of members of the Futurismic gang who have moved on to bigger and brighter things, and there’s no one who fits the bill better than Tobias Buckell, the former Futurismic blogger who’s just finished writing his fourth novel at around the same time the third, Sly Mongoose, hits bookstore shelves. [image from Tobias’ blog]
Tobias is a great writer and a lovely bloke to work with, and also a poster-boy for the “work hard and earnestly and your dreams will come true” approach to life. There’s an interview with Tobias up at the Nebula Awards website that’ll give you an insight into his mindset:
From 15 to 25 I wrote during the time that everyone else played games or watched TV. The average American watches 20-30 hours of TV a week. That’s almost watching TV like a full time job. By swapping out writing, I worked at writing.
Of course, one can question the sanity of working a part time or near full time job for 10 years that hardly started paying anything until recently. I could have started a business on the side. But that’s where my hard work comes from, choosing to make a hard choice about how I spent my time. As a result, I never felt like I worked hard, just that I missed a lot of the stuff people around me seemed to be spending *their* time on. Do I regret not seeing 10 year old TV shows (what’s a ‘Buffy?’) and spending a lot of money on alcohol? In the big picture, not a bit.
Congratulations, Tobias – hope one or more of those awards comes through for you. Hell knows you’ll have deserved it. 🙂