My Italian Interview

.

In conjunction with Dancing With Bears being published in Italy under the name of Gli Dei di Mosca (publisher's page here), I've been interviewed on the Cronache di un sole lontano blog. Cronache di un sole lontano was nominatd for the Italia prize in 2013 as the best fan SF blog.

Those fortunate enough to be literate in Italian can read the interview here.

For those who aren't, here's a one-question excerpt from the interview by Fabio Centamore:

What differences are there between the eighties and nowadays in literary mood? Where is SF headed?

I may be the wrong person to ask, because in the eighties I was young and writing in friendship and competition with the best new writers of the decade.  Every month I’d read the magazines to see if something like Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Black Air” or James Patrick Kelly’s “Mr. Boy” had come out – and if it had, I was driven back to the typewriter (this was before home computers) to try to write something as good but utterly different.  We were all unknowns, or almost so, and making names for ourselves, so there was a particular excitement to the times.   And of course we all romanticize our youth.

The Canadian critic John Clute has a theory that currently science fiction and fantasy are merging into a single genre, which he calls fantastika, a term borrowed from Russia and Scandinavia.  Maybe so.  Certainly, I see a lot more emphasis on pure story and less on ideas nowadays.  (Starting out, it was a commonplace to call SF “the literature of ideas,” but I haven’t heard that term used for a long time.)  But if so it’s a tendency I’m fighting all the way.  This probably sounds strange coming from someone whose science fiction often feels like fantasy and whose fantasy often feels like science fiction.  Nevertheless, Dancing with Bears takes place in the realm of the possible and The Dragons of Babel in the realm of the impossible.  That’s an important distinction and, I feel, a productive one.

Above: The banner for Cronache di un sole lontano.  Pretty nifty, eh?

*