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May 05, 2003
As Others See Us
Steven Poole interviewed William Gibson in Saturday's Guardian. Unfortunately Poole exhibits some of the customary lapses when a mainstream reviewer speaks to a science fiction writer - for example, until Gibson came along apparently science fiction "[...] had been largely about exploring other physical worlds" - but there's enough good stuff here to more than make up for that sort of nonsense. For example, I didn't know that one of the forces which nudged Gibson towards the idea of depicting virtual environments was his perception of his limitations as a writer:
"When I started writing I had a problem of physically moving the characters around," he confesses. "I could do Joe in his room, but getting Joe down the stairs, into the cab and on the plane to Chicago was too much. I think in the very first short story I wrote, I came up with the conceit of a character replaying recorded memories of an ex-girlfriend, and it was marvellous for me because he'd recorded these bits at random, and it was just like these total jump-cuts, and every time I hit a jump-cut the Ballardian ante went up, and I thought, 'This is great, I can do the whole thing and he's actually sitting at his desk!'"
While we're on the subject of mainstream reviewers trying to avoid calling a piece of work "science fiction", I can't resist pointing to a particularly nice example from the As Others See Us section of the current edition of Ansible:
Patrick Gale's review of the new Margaret Atwood novel admires her 'gleeful inventiveness' in imagining unheard-of wonders like 'rats genetically spliced to snakes' or 'pain-free chickens developed to produce only multiple breasts', yet deftly avoids calling this sc**nce f*ct**n: 'In Oryx And Crake she makes a welcome return to fantasy. She would probably chuckle at that and murmur "if only" for, like The Handmaid's Tale, it is less a fantasy than an imaginative projection with a rational foundation in current facts.' Gale's other acceptable code phrase for the genre that dares not speak its name is 'dystopian myth'. (Waterstone's Books Quarterly)
[Via linkmachinego]
Posted by John at May 5, 2003 08:10 PM
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Comments
Ha, yes (I was one of many who shopped it to Ansible). Every Oryx & Crake interview with Atwood repeats some variant on her stereotype of SF: rockets, Martians, teleportation, chemicals, etc. Unlike O&C, with its vastly original concept of the last man wandering about a mutant-infested wasteland following the apocalyptic collapse of civilisation.
Posted by: Ray at May 6, 2003 03:03 AM
Highly original, I'm sure.
I'm guessing Oryx & Crake probably isn't going to show up in next year's Hugo nominations. :-)
Posted by: John at May 6, 2003 11:32 PM
You can read an excerpt at the promotional site. Not badly written, but the promotion is very naff: for instance, the glossary of klunky neologisms, and the news headline list to push the plausibility line.
Posted by: Ray at May 7, 2003 11:49 AM