Charles Platt interviews all the big names in 1983. Fascinating reading. The UK lot do much bitching and sniping, while the US lot talk about guns and money. Pournelle is a classic right-wing gun nut, Vonnegut is sniffy about Farmer, Moorcock is sniffy about Christopher Priest, Platt himself is snooty about Sturgeon. Ellison is the suspect in an episode of Columbo.
The interview with PKD is pretty amazing - this is where he first speaks to a journalist about his encounter with a "non-human, rational mind" in 1974.
Be warned if you go after a copy: there were two volumes featuring different authors, and a confusing array of re-prints, some of which combined material from both. This one was published in 1987 by Ungar in New York, and includes an afterword where Platt (an English journalist who moved to the US) does a What Happened Next on all of the interviewees.
Platt himself is quite interesting - seems he got into personal computing in a big way and is now a devotee of cryonics.
I found this remaindered years ago and devoured it. At that point i'd probably buy anything that had Ballard in it. Still it lead me to others. The Dick interview was particularly revelatory and chimed with Ken Campbell's Pigspurt show, which used the 'revelations' as a throughline. Speaking of which there's a great ? Crumb comic of the Dick experiences.
ReplyDeleteCool, I'll look out for that. I think Dick comes across incredibly well in this interview; genuine and likeable. It probably helped that Platt was a personal friend as well, mind.
Deleteweird seeing the actual faces of all these writers whose words (in most if not all cases) were so deeply familiar to teenage me
ReplyDeletes.f. writers love to talk about what they do - always having workshops, i remember picking up at least a couple of volumes of critical essays about sf written by sf writers, and being given an enormous encylcopedia of s.f. full of quite probing essays about the genre, its meaning and point, the various subgenres (a great short essay by Ballard for instance on catastrophe stories). There's a self-reflexive thing going on with s.f. profession that i've only ever seen equaled by rock critics - related in both cases to the slightly disreputable and marginal nature of each genre, cf Respectable Literature / Proper Journalism - which battles with their deep down belief that what they are doing is the Most Important Writing of Our Time. So there's a sort of combined inferiority and superiority complex at work.
That "inferiority and superiority complex" thing is certainly evident in some of these interviews as I recall! I suppose another thing uniting SF and rock writing is that, while not exactly *new*, both forms are relatively young in the grand scheme, and things are still up for grabs. There's an incentive to claim territory, room to establish Big Ideas etc.
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