Questions and Answers What draws you to science fiction? Because we are the literature that acknowledges the reality and inevitability of change. Perhaps not the only genre where this occurs, but certainly the one where this is the focus. Because my own life's journey growing up was a series of small explosions going off in my head as I discovered that the strict, closed-minded world view I was programmed with was neither uniform in time nor space, arising only in a couple of decades as it did and being rooted in my particular geography (the deep south). Traveling and reading, especially in conjunction, the walls of my world fell away in scales of every increasing size, and SF takes me right beyond the limits of here and now and as far out or up or back as I could ever want to go. Everyone is programmed by their environment, their genetics, a host of other factors, but we can choose to alter the programming by self-selecting what goes in, so nowadays I self-select the literature of the open mind and the sense of wonder. Who is you favorite author? Ha. I don't know if an editor is allowed to answer this one. "They are all my favorite authors" he answers in a preprogrammed monotone. I will say that, AT THIS SPECIFIC MOMENT IN TIME, I am just blown over by Justina Robson's daring in her new Quantum Gravity series. It's just outlandish, audacious fun. I finished reading last week and haven't stopped giggle. But Kay Kenyon was my favorite author while I was working on her manuscript, and before that Ian McDonald's Brasyl, and I have the next Joe Abercrombie to read shortly. You see how it goes. But to try and do a better job with this question - I got into SF as a child through Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian series, and read a lot of Fritz Leiber and Mike Moorcock afterwards. Most of the SF I read was at short story link, the Hall of Fame collections etc... These days, I'm as impressed with Charles Stross and China Miéville as everybody is. If you could give one piece of advice to a would-be author, what would it be? Read, read, read. I am continually approached by would-be writers who tell me they are going to be the hottest thing since sliced bread, and when I ask them who they read, they say Tolkien, Asimov, Clarke. And nothing since. And I tell them they've done the literary equivalent of announcing they are ready to be a brain surgeon after studying the 1858 edition of Gray's Anatomy. If the names Charles Stross, China Miéville, George Martin, John Scalzi, Scott Lynch, Ian McDonald don't mean anything to you - then how do you hope to write something an editor will buy or a reader will read? Know your market. Then, equally important, as my friend and author Fiona Avery says, "Reading isn't writing". The only way to write is write, and write, and write, and write. Michael Swanwick talks about the importance of writing all the bad words out first - the amount of time it takes to get to something good, and Neil Gaiman has stressed how important it is to finish, anything at all, just as long as you get it out, get it done, and move on to the next one. You shouldn't spend your life reinventing the wheel - but certainly don't spend it polishing the same wheel forever. Are you a music fan? If so, what? Music is incredibly important to me. My all time favorites are David Bowie - whose ability to start young, stay one step ahead of the critics, sample from his surrounds, and continually reinvent himself should be an inspiration to every artist in every field, and Robyn Hitchcock, whose retrodelic pop tones were first inspired by William S. Burrough's novel The Soft Machine. (Robyn has two poems in Fast Forward 1, btw.) Also very big on The Beatles, Beck, Dylan, Counting Crows, R.E.M., and Frank Zappa (I'm listening to Joe's Garage right now), but I've just gotten an iPod for Xmas, and the ability to hit "shuffle play" on 4,500 songs is changing my entire relationship with music. It's a prime example of how we are living in the future right now, and underscores the importance of SF as well as the dilemma in packaging it for a new audience who grew up "in the future" and take its accoutrements for granted. I mean, my entire music catalog in a device smaller than a pack of cigarettes? Come on! Do you enjoy book signings/conventions? Enormously. I think it is incalculably important to "refresh the well" and the convention is where that occurs. Also, I'm down on my lonesome in the Deep South, not in NYC, so rubbing elbows with other professionals at cons three or four times a year is the only way I feel like I'm not operating in a total vacuum. Lately, though, I'm looking at conventions less as an opportunity to hang with fellow writers and editors, and more of a place to interact with our readers. That was my focus at last summer's World Con, and I got an enormous amount out of it. I also really enjoyed the Campbell conference, where I got to spend five days having one long conversation with a small group, rather than a hundred five minute conversations with a hundred people. I'd love to do more of those! What book are you reading at the moment? Well, I'm always reading our submission pile, but the books I'd like to be reading now if I had time - John Scalzi's The Android's Dream, Glen Cook's Sung in Blood, and Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn. I would like to be able to read one non-Pyr book a month, but that doesn't usually happen. But I think it's important for an editor to read outside his own list as widely as possible. In fact, I'm going to see if I can sneak Sung in Blood in right after I finish this interview. As a reader do you prefer Science Fiction, Fantasy or Horror? I always thought I preferred SF, and I think Pyr has come to be known as something of a champion of hard SF at the moment, but a few years back I read Michael Swanwick's brilliant essay, "In the tradition" (collected with another essay by Tachyon Books as The Postmodern Archipelago btw, here's the link: http://www.tachyonpublications.com/book/Postmodernarchipelago.html), in which he discusses his thoughts on "source fantasy" verses derivative fantasy, and I realized then that I was much better read in the classics of fantasy than I was in SF, and that most of my childhood reading had been in the former not the latter. These days, I find that what I like is fantasy when it's tackled by an SF writer, like Justina Robson's Quantum Gravity series or Sean Williams' brilliant Books of the Cataclysm. There's something about seeing the SFnal mindset of rigorous explanations for things, whether real or imagined science, applied to the "rules" of magic - it's almost like reading the source book of an RPG, something I still enjoy doing from time to time, though I haven't played since I was 15. Short Story, Single Novel or Novel Series - which do you think is the best medium for Science Fiction? Yes. This is an interesting question because it relates to the background of Fast Forward 1. A while back, there was a discussion in the bloggosphere about the driving force of the genre. Back in the early days of SF's inception, the magazines were all there were, and the first novels were mostly gathered works that had made their debut as serials in the digests, but these days, the digests are dwindling in circulation and it's the novels that command the largest readership. So if there is a driving force in SF - is it at short story or novel length? Certainly, when Charles Stross's Accelerando tales began appearing in Asimov's, that was when the discussion of the singularity first broke as a "thing", a question that SF would concern it with for a bit, the Ace novel coming in after Stross was already a phenomena. Of course, the novel was a phenomenon in its own right, but the "discussion" - the drive to make the singularity part of the ongoing dialogue that is our genre, did occur in the magazines. That got me thinking about how much I love the short story as a form, how outlets for same were on the wane, and how there hadn't been an ongoing anthology series of original, unthemed SF in some time. Hence, Fast Forward 1. I'll take an aside and say I'm really excited about MonkeyBrain Book's plans to publish stand alone SF at novella length. Right now, there aren't a whole lot of outlets for the novella. There's PS Publishing and the occasional serial in the digests, and yet it has been argued that the novella is the ideal length for the SF story. So another venue for this form is a tremendous boon to our field, and I'll be watching their first offerings with great interest. What are your thoughts on writing for shared world series such as Dragonlance and Star Trek? My thoughts on shard worlds and media tie-ins are continually evolving. I began fairly hostile to them, mellowed to the point where I grudgingly acknowledged they could be a gateway drug and probably weren't as harmful as I first supposed, and have finally come to feel that while I am not opposed to them, they are simply not the side of the fence that is going to get my personal support, since they don't need as much as many deserving works of original SF do. I've blogged and written about this a great deal, chiefly about Star Wars novels. Since then, the number of people who have written to me about how Star Wars brought them into SF literature has changed my mind. My objection now isn't the Star Wars novel, but to Star Wars itself. James Gunn once said that SF cinema gave us "concreteness of image" without the accompanying depth, and it drives me bonkers that all the artistry of so many technicians and graphic illustrators and model makers and other creative types goes into a franchise that is so lame at its central core. I have no doubt there are some excellent novels, games, comics, etc... in the giant universe of ancillary product - I just wish the movies had been better! I am so excited about the 21st century of filmmaking we are just now embarking on, as the increasing democratization of the filmmakers tool and the plummeting cost of computer effects means that we are very likely to see hundreds of films every bit as magnificent in scale and scope as Star Wars, and many of them will be better written. Conversion of media is the future and I am not opposed to it - just excited that we are entering a time of unprecedentedly good TV and film media - Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, Doctor Who, Rome, Casino Royale, Batman Begins, LotR are all tremendous - and the future will only be better. Maybe we can get beyond the tired, old franchises when it gets here. Why do you think SF gets a bad press? First, I think that this is really an apples to oranges issue. I think genre in general gets bad press from academics and literary writers, but they are even more of a niche interest than we are if you judge by their sales numbers. Charles Stross compared it to the distain traded back and forth between aficionados of jazz and classical music. One side may never convince the other of its value - but who cares? Each to his own. And as far as the majority of readers are concerned, who probably don't even know what the word "genre" means in this context, it's no contest. Now, as to SF - I think it's a pendulum that swings back and forth continually. SF tends to be respectable or not depending on whether or not Hollywood has recently produced a hit film or television show of both box office and critical respectability. When The Next Generation was at its height, back in the early 90s, there was no stigma whatsoever. You either watched Melrose Place or TNG on a Monday night, but you watched one of the two (apples and oranges). I remember sitting in a coffee shop in Chicago and realizing that multiple tables, full of attractive 20 and 30 something couples, were all buzzing "Spock's going to be on Next Generation! Spock's going to be on Next Generation!" That's when I realized Star Trek was the mainstream. Around that time, you could go to the Pasadena convention and see lots of middle class parents with their kids, and people had "Star Fleet University" or "Vulcan Academy" stickers in the windows of their Japanese economy cars. But they pissed this cachet away with Voyager, and the stigma returned. You see this happening again between The Matrix and The Matrix Revolutions. The former film did an amazing service to the cause of "smart Hollywood" but the third film undercut it. Now, with Time, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly all proclaiming Battlestar Galactica the "best drama on television," we see the respect coming back in. And a wave of very smart SF&F films like The Prestige, Children of Men, and Pan's Labyrinth. These will only be good for the perception of genre in the mainstream. And, in fact, as I write this, Chris Roberson has just emailed to tell me that HBO has greenlit a series based on George R.R. Martin's books. See? But of course, there are some people who will never be converted. That's fine. Some people will never like jazz. Some people will never eat sushi. Some people will never be Christian. Some people will never be atheist. The world is a big place, and we don't all have to like the same thing. But as we come to live in the future more and more every day (did I mention my iPod?), it's really getting pretty absurd to deny SF's relevance, whether it happens to be your cup of tea or no. What's the most memorable thing said in a review of your work? Norman Spinrad, writing in the pages of Asimov's, called our books "pitched down the middle SF" saying that we were publishing science fiction for smart, literate readers of same, and fantasy in the same vein. He meant we were publishing what another reviewer, speaking of one of my anthologies, described as "pure quill SF." My goal all along has been to publish - not cross-genre, or New Wave, or literary mainstream with SFnal tropes - but pure, recognizable SF&F with the quality dialed up a notch. That this is what we are being recognized as publishing, in both the short and long form, is enormously gratifying. Plug away - what do you have coming out? Well, Pyr has a really strong spring season about to kick in. In March, we've got Adam Roberts's Gradisil, a tale of war in the near future that has been drawing comparisons to Robert Heinlein. Sort of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress set in near-earth orbit. Nation building and war right over our heads. Really good stuff. Also out that month is Justina Robson's Keeping It Real, the first of her Quantum Gravity books, about an essentially bionic woman assigned to body guard an elf who has left the realm of the elves for that of the demons and come back a rock star. The book has to be read to be believed - it's so audacious - and may emerge as one of my favorite sci-fantasies as all time. Plus, it should appeal to everyone from fans of Charles Stross and William Gibson to fans of Jim Butcher and Patricia Briggs - and how often can you say that? Then in April we have Breakaway, the next Cassandra Kresnov novel from Joel Shepherd. This is the sequel to Crossover, a tale of an engineered super soldier who develops a conscience and hotfoots it to a planet of her former enemies. Joel writes superb action, but he also captures the nuances of politics - whether interpersonal, interdepartmental, or interplanetary - extremely well. Fans of Richard Morgan and Elizabeth Bear especially take note. Then there's Kay Kenyon's Bright of the Sky, the first novel in a truly epic adventure about an earthman thrust into a pocket universe. It's teaming with imaginative races, strange landscapes, and high concepts. And Kay's just revamped her website around it, so go to www.kaykenyon.com to see all kinds of ancillary material, chapter excerpts, etc… Then, in May, we have Ian McDonald's next masterpiece, Brasyl. I could keep going, but I think I've already stuffed everyone's shopping cart through the summer by now. But please go to www.pyrsf.com - help drive our stat counter up! - and see for yourself! 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