New Wave Classics for a Chinese Editor

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The other day, I shared an essay I wrote to explain the New Wave to a Chinese audience. It was never published, but that was okay. I wrote it primarily as a gesture of friendship to an editor and a magazine and a community who had showed me the utmost friendship.

Science Fiction World is not only a magazine but a book publishing company. I once visited their offices on shipping day and since the titles and authors of Western reprints were, as a courtesy, printed in English as well as Chinese, I can testify that they have excellent taste in science fiction.

The editor who solicited my essay also asked if I could recommend New Wave SF they might want to reprint. I have no idea if they used any of them. In any case, here's what I came up with:

This is the list I promised of New Wave books. I’ve tried to exclude those with too much sex in them – which is a problem for many New Wave writers, particularly Ballard and Silverberg, who frequently dealt with sex as a topic. But it’s possible some have slipped past me. I haven’t the time to reread all the books and my memory of many of these is decades old. I have placed them all in rough chronological order.

I omitted several works that I knew had already been published by Science Fiction World, but it’s possible that some of these are already in your line. If so, I apologize.

New Wave Classics

1966:

J. G. Ballard: The Crystal World

Ballard’s earlier books were natural disaster novels. This one morphs the form into something beautiful and threatening – much like the crystallization that transforms the forest, its animals and even human beings into something impossible. The protagonist’s journey to a secluded leper colony is also an interior one into the self.

1967:

Samuel R. Delany: Babel-17

Delany is the second-most influential science fiction writer in modern times, after Robert A. Heinlein. This is one of his most entertaining books, both a space opera and an explication of the (since discredited, alas) Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Crammed with ideas and colorfully written. Linguistics has never been more fun than this.

Roger Zelazny: Lord of Light

Long before the beginning of this novel, the crew of the spaceship that colonized its world seized control of all technological assets and set themselves up as gods – specifically, the gods of the Hindu pantheon. One man sets out to overthrow the gods, first with armies and later by assuming the role of the Buddha. Like Delany’s novel, this is wonderfully enjoyable.

1968:

Thomas Disch: Camp Concentration

In a future right-wing America, intellectuals are locked away in concentration camps and given a tailored that turns them into geniuses whose discoveries, made as they’re slowly dying, can be used by the State. The transformation of an ordinary man into one of these geniuses is brilliantly portrayed and a glorious reading experience.

R. A Lafferty: Past Master

Sir Thomas More, martyred by Henry VIII and sainted by the Catholic Church, is resurrected in a future world (not Earth) that has been made into a Utopia. His task is twofold: to discover why people are rejecting Utopia to live in pain and squalor and to avoid being executed a second time for speaking the truth to officials who don’t want to hear it. He succeeds at one of these. Comic, rambling, and profound.

Robert Silverberg: Hawksbill Station

Set in a penal colony in the Precambrian era which has been established by an authoritarian American government. Because time travel is one-way only, the political prisoners receive supplies on a regular basis but can never return to their own era. One day a visitor arrives from a new government that has replaced the old one. They can return home again. But will they want to?

John Sladek: The Reproductive System/Mechasm

Sladek was a comic writer and satirist. Despite the titles (one US, the other UK), this is not a book about human reproduction but about Turing machines that threaten to run out of control. Also a satire on corporate life, science fiction, and pretty much everything else. And very funny. It even has a happy ending!

1969:

Philip K. Dick: Ubik

One of Dick’s best (and best-known) novels and probably the one that challenges reality the most thoroughly.

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness

An anthropologist comes to a world where people only have gender for two days out of the month and falls in love with one of its citizens. One of the classic novels of science fiction. A great feminist work and an exploration of what it means to be human.

Michael Moorcock: Behold the Man

An obsessed Christian time-travels two thousand years into the past to meet Jesus – and discovers that his Savior doesn’t exist. In desperation and madness, he becomes the Christ he sought.

Joanna Russ: Picnic on Paradise

A tough female agent is charged with rescuing a group of nuns and rich tourists from a war zone on the planet Paradise. They must cross hundreds of miles of wilderness without any modern technology. The trek is challenging but the greatest danger comes from the people being rescued and their lack of moral character. A serious examination of and challenge to the traditional SF adventure form.

1970:

R. A. Lafferty: Nine Hundred Grandmothers

Lafferty is most famous for his short fiction – clever, witty, full of strange ideas, and like nothing anybody else has ever written. This is his best collection.

1971:

J. G. Ballard: Vermillion Sands

A much-imitated and never-equaled collection of stories all set in a decadent desert resort town fallen on bad times and occupied by aesthetes, and alcoholics. Women walk land-sharks on leashes and buy living clothing that reacts to their moods. Artists sculpt clouds. Eerily affecting.

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Lathe of Heaven

Le Guin’s Taoist/Philip K. Dick novel. A therapist discovers that his patient, suffering from dreams of a nuclear holocaust, has the power to alter reality, and sets out to improve the world. But every “improvement” only makes things worse.

1972:

John Brunner: The Sheep Look Up

Written very much in the same style as Stand on Zanzibar, this is probably the most convincing and terrifying ecological disaster novel ever written.

Michael Moorcock: The Dancers at the End of Time trilogy (An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands, The End of All Songs)

Despite his championing of the New Wave, Moorcock mostly wrote fantasy at that time. These books are a grand exception. Set not long before the death of the Sun and the extinction of the human race, at a time when want and poverty have been forgotten, and individuals control near-infinite power and have nothing better to do than to indulge their every whim. These are actually very moral books. It’s pleasant to imagine having the power these people have. But they are shallow and idle – you wouldn’t want to be one of them. Each volume functions as a stand-alone novel.

Gene Wolfe: The Fifth Head of Cerberus

Three closely-related novellas, set on an extrasolar colony world that is slowly failing. Since the world is poor in metals, the technology relies heavily on the biological sciences, which is horribly misused. Clones are created as slaves and subhuman watchdogs. Meanwhile, the original inhabitants of the planet may not be as extinct as everyone assumes.

1973:

James Tiptree, Jr.: Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home

A bleak and exhilarating collection. Two of Tiptree’s great themes were biological determinism and cultural imperialism. Her stories appeared at the end of the New Wave and can be seen as both its culmination and its replacement.

1975:

Harlan Ellison: Deathbird Stories

Harlan Ellison has made a career out of short fiction – save for a couple of early, not very important attempts, he doesn’t write novels – and this is probably his best collection. He uses both fictional and non-fictional introductions to bind his vivid, colorful, emotional stories into a single, coherent narrative and a scream of pain and rage against the universe.

Ellison championed the New Wave with his Dangerous Visions anthologies. These stories are probably the best examples of what he had in mind.

Above: Science Fiction World has, I am told, the largest readership of any SF magazine in the world. When I saw the Western SF books ready to be shipped, I also saw an equal number of original Chinese SF novels. And I so very much wished I could read Chinese!

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The New Wave Explained in Fewer Words Than Ever Before!

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Several-to-many years ago, an editor at Science Fiction World in Chengdu, China, asked me to write an essay explaining the New Wave to the magazine's audience. Since I loved the New Wave and had a rudimentary understanding of the Chinese publishing industry's view of what could and could not be published there, I was happy to oblige. 

The essay I wrote was never published. There are many reasons why this might have happened so I will not speculate. But, having run across it while reorganizing my files, I thought I would share it with you.

Oh! and, since SFW is not only a magazine but a publishing house, I was asked to suggest some New Wave books they might consider publishing. The list I provided will be posted here on Monday.

Here's the essay. This is its first publication ever:

The New Wave in a Nutshell: Inner Space, Sharks on Leashes, the Acid-Head Wars, Genius Jailbirds, a Pregnant King, Shattered Taboos, a Morose Telepath, Shocking Excess, Literary Success, the End of the World and Its Aftermath, and Long, Long Titles

by

Michael Swanwick

At the time it felt like a revolution. A literary revolution, that is, which is the best kind of revolution because nobody dies in it and only feelings get hurt. The New Wave lasted for a decade (from 1965 to 1975, give or take a few years), during which it was all anybody in science fiction talked about, argued over, or denounced. My first fan letter, after it was all over, asked if I thought there would be another New Wave anytime soon. There is no doubt that it changed science fiction forever.

But what exactly was the New Wave?

Tough question.

Science fiction writers had always had a difficult relationship with literary writers and critics who, as a rule, looked down on them. They responded by declaring the supremacy of adventure fiction, asserting a need for heroes and straightforward stories plainly written, and declaring that literary fiction was “boring.” But in the early Sixties, some genre writers felt that the literary establishment had a point – that science fiction could be a lot better than it was and that the way to improve it was by using the techniques of serious fiction. They were a varied group and not all of them got along well. But they shared a common ambition to write SF both better than and significantly differently from what had come before.

In 1964, a young writer became editor of the British science fiction magazine New Worlds. Michael Moorcock had a new vision of science fiction. It would be centered not on outer space but on “inner space.” It would be set in the near future and deal not with spaceships and robots but with the workings of the human psyche. Its protagonists would be regular people, not scientists and explorers. And it would be comfortable with experimental prose, dystopias, entropy, and a pessimistic view of the future. Luckily for Moorcock, someone writing exactly what he was looking for was at that moment just hitting his stride.

J. G. Ballard was a boy when the Japanese overran Shanghai and placed him and his parents in an internment camp for the duration of WWII. He had no illusions about human nature. Ballard’s early books were disaster novels, like The Crystal World wherein plants, animals, and even people are slowly turning to crystal. He also wrote surreal stories collected in Vermillion Sands, about a resort town in which elegant women walk genetically modified land sharks on leashes, boutiques sell living dresses, and artists use gliders to sculpt clouds. But his work grew increasingly involved in psychological space. His novels include Concrete Island, in which a man is marooned, like Robinson Crusoe, only on a traffic island, and the extremely controversial Crash, about a subculture of people who are sexually aroused by automobile accidents.

Almost as central to the movement was Brian Aldiss. His Greybeard takes the form of a quest novel. But it is set decades after a massive nuclear accident has sterilized everyone on Earth. In a world without children, there can be no purpose to the voyage that Greybeard and his wife make other than to find a quiet place in which to live out humanity’s last days. Aldiss’s most astonishing work, Barefoot in the Head, is set in the aftermath of the Acid-Head War, fought with psychochemical aerosols that still linger in the environment. Everybody in Europe is continually in a drug-altered state, a fact reflected by the novel’s prose. Into this madhouse comes a young savior, Charteris, with a new mode of thinking based on the philosophy of Gurdjieff. But as he gains followers, Charteris comes to realize that they’re all looking forward to his martyrdom. He must find an alternative or die.

Moorcock himself tackled a similar theme in Behold the Man. A religious fanatic travels in time to study at the feet of Jesus, only to find that there is no such person. Disillusionment drives him half-mad, and he finds himself assuming the role of Christ, even though he knows how it must inevitably end.

The New Worlds crowd included some American writers then living in England. John Sladek was a brilliant satirist in an age almost too absurd to satirize. (He wrote a “nonfiction” satire of New Age mysticism, Arachne Rising, asserting that there is a thirteenth constellation in the Zodiac whose existence has been hushed-up by scientists, only to see the gullible accept it as fact.) Self-replicating machines run out of control in Mechasm, threatening to destroy civilization. Unfortunately, the only man who can stop them is locked in his office cafeteria, crouched atop a table floating in a lake of bad coffee from a malfunctioning brewing machine. It gets stranger from there.

In Thomas Disch’s first novel, The Genocides, aliens convert the Earth to cropland and treat people as pests to be exterminated. It ends not with survivors building a new world but with the last humans dying. When outraged fans objected, he urbanely explained that having survivors would “destroy the purity of the thing.” In Disch’s masterpiece, Camp Concentration, a journalist discovers first that a totalitarian American government is injecting prisoners with a tailored disease that turns them into geniuses whose discoveries can be exploited before they die, and then that he himself has been infected. The gradual transformation of the hero from normal intelligence to near-superhuman status is a tour de force of modern fiction.

Ever the contrarian, defying the New Wave proclivity for pessimism, Disch gave his novel a happy ending.

So far, the New Wave was a British phenomenon. In 1968 Judith Merrill transferred it to America via a much-discussed anthology of New Wave fiction titled England Swings SF. In the introduction, she wrote that what was happening in England was the most important development in all of science fiction. There were only two possible reactions to this. Those writers who wanted to write SF pretty much the way it had always been resented being labeled Old Wave and hated this new thing. Everybody else was mad to be a part of it.

Where Moorcock was chiefly concerned with what science fiction was about, Merrill cared more about how it was told. The best examples of how mainstream techniques could be imported into science fiction were John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, both of which made the grim consequences of overpopulation bearable to read about by telling the story in collage form. The novels were shown through the eyes of dozens of protagonists, with excerpts from books, newspaper articles, and the like scattered throughout. Thus the hero of these books was not a single individual but everybody. The collage technique was old news to the literary world but stunningly effective when applied to science fiction.

Almost simultaneously, writer Harlan Ellison assembled what is probably the single most famous original anthology in the history of the field, Dangerous Visions. Ellison’s New Wave was all about breaking taboos: religious, political, sexual, literary, what-have-you. Every story he bought was a taboo breaker. Some of these have aged badly. Theodore Sturgeon’s “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Want One to Marry Your Sister?” (long titles were a commonplace of the era) was a rousing defense of incest. This looked bold and daring at the time but today seems simplistic and wrong-headed. But several of the stories were classics. Some won major awards. One of these was by Samuel R. Delany.

Delany’s influence on science fiction can hardly be exaggerated, in part because while literarily innovative, he didn’t give up on the traditional pleasures of science fiction. Babel-17 is a good example of this. It was an exploration of the (since disproved) Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis that language shapes human perception, with a poet-linguist-and-starship-captain named Rydra Wong, zero-gee battles, space pirates, and enough fresh new ideas to float the entire career of a lesser talent. It was colorful, exciting – and as sophisticated as anything appearing in the mainstream.

In their early years, Delany was often confused with Roger Zelazny, another writer who combined spaceships and adventures on alien planets with erudition and a flashy prose style. (Zelazny turned to SF after failing as a poet.) Lord of Light is set in a world based on Indian mythology and culture. Everyone is effectively immortal – reincarnation is a simple matter of going to a temple where a machine will place your consciousness in a new young body. Technology, however, is controlled by the crew of the ship that originally brought humanity to the planet and they use it to pass themselves off as the Hindu gods. When the inevitable violent rebellion fails, who better to lead a peaceful revolution than the Buddha?

All the writers mentioned so far are male because at that time the field was overwhelmingly male. That was beginning to change. Two of the many women now entering science fiction, Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin, happened to be among the very best writers of their era. Both, unsurprisingly, were feminists. Joanna Russ’s debut novel, Picnic on Paradise, featured a heroine unlike any female protagonist previously seen in SF. In a galactic milieu filled with tall, beautiful, irresponsible people, Alyx is short, plain, tough, fierce, and competent. When war breaks out on a resort planet, she is assigned the task of rescuing a stranded group of tourists by guiding them through dangerous wilderness without using any modern tools, which would bring them to the attention of the warring factions. The greatest danger, however, comes not from the war but from the moral weakness of the tourists themselves.

Usula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness begins with the sentence, “The king was pregnant.” and presents a world in which people are sexless save for a few days each month, when their bodies randomly turn either male or female. This allowed Le Guin to examine the question of how much of our gender roles are biological and how much socially determined. It was an instant classic. In almost fifty years, it has never gone out of print.

Because of his essential strangeness, Philip K. Dick is always included among the New Wave writers, though there is little doubt he would have written exactly as he did if the movement had never existed. Over the course of dozens of novels, Dick obsessively examined the nature of reality as something other than what it appears to be. This, combined with some incautious statements in interviews, led to the impression that he was half-mad. Yet people who worked with him assure me that he was unfailingly rational. Unlike most writers, no single work stands out among his oeuvre. With Dick, you can start reading anywhere.

The last of the New Wave greats is Robert Silverberg, a man seemingly capable of writing well about anything. He received his greatest critical acclaim for Dying Inside. Its premise is simple. Selig has the extremely rare gift of reading minds. Yet, despite that, or possibly because of it, he has made almost nothing of his life. In middle age, he’s making a meager living writing term papers for college students. Then he discovers that his telepathic power is fading away. Alone and miserable, he has no choice but to come to terms with it. Telepathy has long been a power fantasy in science fiction. But Silverberg used it to create a meditation on the fact that everyone, no matter how powerful or insignificant – and Selig is both – must someday acknowledge their own mortality.

For a decade, exciting and innovative new works, like nothing ever seen before, appeared one after another, surprise upon surprise, on an almost monthly basis. It was an thrilling time to be a reader. Anything, it seemed, was possible.

Only it wasn’t.

Editors had long known that many New Wave authors did not sell well. But so long as the SF line as a whole made money, they were able to publish them anyway. Then came computers. It was now possible to track sales of every individual title. Overnight, it became obvious that conventional science fiction – the Old Wave – vastly outsold the New Wave. Word went down to cut the deadwood.

Some authors, such as R. A. Lafferty, the most original writer of his time, had to retreat to the small presses. Others quit writing. Yet others unenthusiastically switched back to the old stuff. At least one changed his name and wrote detective novels. British science fiction disappeared from American bookstores.

It felt like the end of the world.

In the aftermath, the conventional wisdom was that New Wave fiction was self-indulgent, plotless, and depressing. It’s true that there were excesses. Robert Silverberg’s time travel novel Up the Line featured almost non-stop sex. Brian Aldiss’s The Dark Light-Years was about trying to understand an alien species that communicated by defecating. A lot of short fiction by writers now long forgotten made no coherent sense at all. But it would be wrong to judge the New Wave by its worst examples.

If we judge the movement by its best, the New Wave was a tremendous success. Well before he died, J. G. Ballard was recognized by the literary establishment as one of Britain’s foremost writers. Stand on Zanzibar was a best-seller. Roger Zelazny’s work remained immensely popular. So did that of Delany and Le Guin, who are now darlings of Academia; the number of papers written about their work is legion. Silverberg was coaxed out of retirement by the largest advance ever offered a science fiction writer and wrote the immensely successful Lord Valentine’s Castle.

More importantly, the candle flame of literary ambition may have flickered but it never died. New writers were coming along, like James Tiptree, Jr. whose stories of biological determinism and alien colonialism were first collected in Ten Thousand Light Years from Home and Gene Wolfe, whose The Fifth Head of Cerberus can equally well be considered the last major work of the New Wave or the first of what came after. None of the new writers thought that SF and serious literature were two separate things. Nobody could tell them that science fiction couldn’t be about serious subjects or told in a literary way.

The New Wave had proved that wasn’t true.

When I responded to that fan letter asking if there would ever be a new New Wave, I said no. It simply wasn’t needed. And time has proved me right. What I didn’t know, however, was that Cyberpunk was about to happen and that for close to a decade, it would be all that anybody in science fiction talked about, argued over, or denounced.

But that’s another story, for another day.

 

Above: Marianne bought this carry-on bag for me in Canada. It's made from Italian leather and the Chinese flag was one of several they offered. I chose China because I'd never been there and hoped someday to visit. And I have! Several times. Our global interdependence can, on occasion, be a good thing. 

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My Thumbnail History of Fantasy on Fantasy Cafe--Also, a Book Giveaway!

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I am pleased to announce that I have a guest essay on Fantasy Cafe. Furthermore, they're offering a book giveaway of my new collection, The Universe Box. 

 The essay is titled "A Thumbnail History of Twentieth-Century Fantasy" and at 1,200 words it's not only the briefest but also the most accurate summary of the topic you'll ever encounter.

Here's how it begins:

Every history of fantasy I’ve read—and there are far from enough of them—starts at some carefully-chosen literary work in the distant past and proceeds to trace a line of influence and inevitability from that point to the present moment.

But I was there. I saw it happen. And I’m here to tell you that they all got it wrong.

Fantasy was born... 

You can read what I had to say here and enter the competition to win a copy of my book as well. Or just go to https://www.fantasybookcafe.com/ and poke around. There's a lot of material there that's worth your attention.

 

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Short Fiction Review: "Je Ne Regrette Rien" by James Patrick Kelly

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James Patrick Kelly, who is easily one of the best short fiction writers we have and has been so for decades, has a new story in the January 2026 issue of Clarkesworld and it is...

But plot synopsis first. Judgement later. In "Je Ne Regrette Rien," Professor Reed Cheng, a distinguished expert in robotics, has accepted an invitation to China to learn about a new kind of robot, "ni ren." The term translates as "anthropomorphic" and he has doubts about the project from the beginning. In America, robots are deliberately made as mechanical-looking as possible to assuage an understandable common fear of humans being replaced. They are programmed, rather than having human teachers as the ni ren do. And he is fairly certain that they will never achieve full sentience. Which is good, because that's not only dangerous but illegal.

Quietly, Kelly establishes that Professor Cheng is over a hundred years old, that he has been rejuvenated twice (reincarnation is one of the story's themes), and that doctors have informed him that he has only another fifty years to live. He is still in mourning for his wife, sixty years older than he, who died at a tragically young-for-their-era age. Oh, and he's a nice guy, reflexively kind to the ni ren, even though he initially believes they are only mindlessly imitating human behavior. All this is presented without melodrama, and it will all come into play at the story's conclusion.

The ni ren are a lovely creation. Kelly has been to China and he clearly has spent his time there wisely, listening to speech patterns and observing what things are said aloud and what are not. As a result, the ni ren come across as not only likeable but also admirable in the way that the young people creating a distinctly Chinese science fiction literature are. While being tinged with a sadness that is unique to this story. The reader will come to the conclusion that they are fully sentient long before Professor Cheng does.

I don't think it's giving anything away to say that it turns out that Reed Cheng is being manipulated. There wouldn't be much of a story if he weren't. But he is perceptive enough to see the manipulation and to draw his own conclusions about it. And the ending pulls everything together in a single evocative image that suggests more than one possible interpretation of what has gone before. I've been thinking over its implications ever since.

"Je Ne Regrette Rien," is magisterial.

You can read the story here. Or you can wait until August and read it in Kelly's forthcoming Fairwood Press collection The Book of Bots containing twelve of his stories about robots and AI from 1997 to 2026, along with two related essays.

And as long as I'm speculating . . .

Like so many words and terms, ni ren has several differing meanings. One of them means, in Chinese Buddhism, "a sufferer in niraya, or hell, or doomed to it." I can easily see this meaning in the fix the ni ren are in--living, feeling, intelligent individuals who are simultaneously property and subject to being turned off forever if their upkeep proves unprofitable.

I don't think there's any way, short of asking the author, to determine whether this reading was intentional or not. But even if it isn't intentional, I think it's a valid one.

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In Which I Am Interviewed On The Coode Street Podcast

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That was quick.

Last night, Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe interviewed me for their Coode Street Podcast. This morning, it was up. You have to admire the industry of that.

Here's what they had to say about it:

Today, Jonathan and Bary are joined by Nebula, World Fantasy, and five-time Hugo Award winner Michael Swanwick to discuss the origins of some of his stories, the life and craft of the professional writer, and his extraordinary new short story collection, The Universe Box.

It's always a strange experience, spending an extended period of time talking about oneself. It reminds me of my first meeting with William Gibson when he was guest of honor at Philcon--his first such gig, if I recall correctly. He said then that when the weekend was over, he was going to have to "lie down in a dark room with a damp cloth over his ego."

So too, now, with me.

You can hear the podcast here.

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"A Box of Fierce Delight": Rich Horton's Review of THE UNIVERSE BOX.

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The astonishingly well-read Rich Horton reviewed The Universe Box on Strange at Ecbatan on Substack. And he was most gratifyingly positive. Here's how he began:

Michael Swanwick’s latest collection is The Universe Box, from Tachyon Books. Swanwick is a first-rate novelist, but his real forté seems to me to be short fiction -- he’s done remarkable work at all lengths -- he’s probably published more flash fiction than any writer in the field (much of it published in lovely tiny editions of chapbooks handmade by his wife Marianne Porter for her Dragonstairs Press. And he’s published well over hundred longer stories, which have garnered a Nebula, a World Fantasy Award, and five Hugos. His work shows tremendous range and inventiveness.

The Universe Box is stuffed with wonderful recent stories. There isn’t a bad one in the bunch, and many are brilliant.

I won’t bury the lede -- there is a brand new story here that is just fantastic. Even this early in the year, I am pretty sure “Requiem for a White Rabbit” will be on my Hugo nomination list, and we will be lucky readers if any story better than it comes along. 

You can read the entire review here.

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My *Armed With A Book* Interview

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The Universe Box, my newest collection of short fiction from Tachyon Publications is now available for sale! And in an absolute non-coincidence, I've been interviewed on Armed With A Book. (Great title, by the way.)

As a general rule, interviews tend to be either serious ("How does it feel to be a genius?" "Um, good, I guess") or silly ("Give me the names of three ducks." "Um, Huey, Dewey, and Donald"). This was one of the serious ones. But I did my best to be serious and entertaining at the same time. Here, for instance, is part of my answer to the question of what keeps me returning to short fiction:

The novel is a wonderful, shambling, shaggy, and digressive beast that eats what it wants and sleeps where it will. The short story is a predator. It zeroes in on its prey, stalks it, and attacks. The novel is about many things. The short story, only one. But that one is worth every word spent on it.

Which should give you an idea of whether the interview is your sort of thing or not. If it is, you can read it here. Or just go to Armed With A Book at armedwithabook.com and poke around. It's a pretty nifty website.

Above: I stole the "three ducks" witticism from either Michael Kurland's The Unicorn Girl or Chester Anderson's The Butterfly Kid, I forget which. There weren't many hippie science fiction novels, but those were two of the best.

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