Writers I admire, and have admired long-term, and have (at times) tried to emulate, include Tolkien and Mary Renault (for her amazing ability to omit). Writers I still admire but doubt I could emulate include Ursula Le Guin, Patricia McKillip and Samuel Delany, all three for their style, but Delany also for the amazing things he did with the fantasy genre in the Neveryon series.
Probably the deepest influence overall, though, which your next question made me remember, was a single line from the Spanish surrealist poet Federico Garcia Lorca. The preface to his translated poems in Penguin had a reference to one of his essays on something called “duende.” He defined it as writing that had heart, guts and soul. That, I think, has been what I’ve tried from then on to do.
Amberlight is literate futuristic Science Fiction and Fantasy and feminist too. Who do you think will be the audience for this book?
Amberlight also takes place in an urban setting. Does this mean it addresses racial issues?
Does this mean there are no racial issues, or none recognized, in the bush, ie. a rural setting? But the answer to the question here would be, regretfully, not as much about racial issues as I’d consciously want. This one seems to focus more on class.
Many futuristic writers often try to make statements about the future. It’s a temptation. Did you succumb to it?
Nup. This setting isn’t our future, and I don’t think SF really is about the future. As Delany put it, roughly, SF uses the future to show a distorted picture of the present. You only have to read a few past-decade SF novels to realize how poorly most of us actually do foresee the future. Really, whether we use SF or fantasy, the past or the future, we can only write about the present.
Where do you think speculative fiction is heading?
It appears to me that the fantasy section is suffering from market problems – poor distribution, publishers taken over by megacorps with unrealistic profit expectations, which has excised mid-lists and left a few big names at the top and the rest of us to rely on the small firms that are, thank heavens, springing up as the big names ossify. Enormous potential for those smaller firms to foster the new and different, as Juno is trying to do, opposing the usual tendency, promoted by publishers’ playing it safe – and who can blame the small houses? to look for either the next Robert Jordan or yet another flavour of the month. I think the current flavour of paranormal fantasy, esp. the vampire story, is about at its use-by date, though I’d expect contemporary fantasy would continue for quite a while. At the same time, net and e-publishing have produced a plethora of texts at a time when readership is lessening. What the outcome of that will be I’d have no idea.
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