Coalescent

LJ: You are a self-confessed utopian, and certainly, this comes through in your work. When faced with current world conflicts like war, famine and AIDS, what makes you veer towards this positive outlook rather than the opposite?

KSR: War, famine, and plague have existed for millennia, maybe for as long as humans have been a species, and so given this situation as a baseline, we're now approaching a time when we must do something about it, or cause the sixth great extinction event for the Earth's biosphere, and untellable suffering to humanity as well. And we have a very rapidly expanding technological ability, and scientific understanding of the world. So it seems to me a kind of race between progress and catastrophe; and that being the case, why not write about progress winning out? We need some visualizations of what we might want to work toward, and how we might go about it.

It makes for interesting novels to try to tell these tales, and there are not that many novels doing this work, so it is a slightly empty ecological niche in world culture, especially given its potential importance. So obviously it's one of the things to try.

SA: What do you think of the idea that there is no room for error in a short story, the way there might be in a novel? And can we talk a little about how you combine the use of very strong, deliberately obvious metaphors (the way they’re used in fairy tales) with images that seem like they should stand for something, but it’s difficult to suss out exactly what that is?

KL: I’ve been trying to write different kinds of stories recently. I’m trying to be more digressive, to show a little bit more, to use more novelistic techniques. I’m trying to leave more room for error and slippages, if that makes sense, because I think that errors and digressions are part of what makes art. On the other hand, when I read novels, I’m very much a short story writer. I get impatient with sloppy or indulgent writing. Even if the plot is thrilling, I get bogged down. For example, I stopped reading The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova because she used the adverb "warily" over and over and over again, sometimes on the same page. (On the other hand, someone has just rereleased Stephen Bury’s — who was really Neal Stephenson writing with another man — Cobweb. That’s a fantastic thriller.)

I’m most forgiving of endings. I don’t believe in them. And it’s very rare that you get an ending that’s as perfect as, say, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle.

RK: You are currently working a new book for Pyr. What can you tell us about it?

CR: The new book is called Paragaea: A Planetary Romance, and it's one that I’ve been tinkering with for the last few years. The intention is to do a science fantasy in the vein of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, but to do it as strictly rationalized, 'hard' SF. The story concerns a female Soviet cosmonaut who, in the early Sixties, is transported to another dimension, and finds herself in a post-historic world of Jaguar Men, timelost Napoleonic-era British naval officers (one of whom has a really familiar last name ... ), pterosaur-riding pirates, ancient androids, talking trees, floating cities, airships ... you know, the same old story

NG: Well, Lord Byron's Novel does have many very exciting elements one might associate with genre fiction—the atmosphere of the Oriental fantasy tale; ferocious combat among Albanian clansfolk; an ancient crumbling mansion; a mysterious murder; a zombie rescuer; smugglers; battle scenes; doppelgangers; somnambulant episodes; a global revolutionary brotherhood; and so forth. And a certain "Roony J. Welch" may just be quasi-immortal. ... Is LBN in any major sense a work of fantasy?

JC: Well, I don't think Byron's novel is—as Ada points out, it may be sensational, wild and fantastic, but there are no strictly supernatural elements in it. Is mine? I think that if a novel has no whiff at all of the impossible, the fabulous, the inexplicable, the metaphysical as the Romantics meant the word, then it isn't very realistic, because the real (this, our shared physical and biological) world does have those intimations in it. (When the intimations become certainties, you have fantasy.)

None of these stories are trifling distractions from the truly substantial work of writing novels. They are pieces that demanded to be brought to life, and that decided, in their own wisdom, to be 12 or 29 pages long rather than a few hundred. Forget all that nonsense about short stories being essentially different from novels, more like poetry, blah blah blah. A good short story is a fictional vision which, in its optimal form, happens to have a short page count. It need not be short on ideas; indeed, some of the best have more content than many puffed-up magnum opuses.

'Point of No Return' by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
'Delhi' by Vandana Singh
'The Wolfman of Alcatraz' by Howard Waldrop