Concept Sci-fi

Gary Reynolds talks to Walter Jon Williams (July 2008)...

Can you describe how you got into writing Science Fiction?  What drew you to the genre?

I've always read and loved SF, but when I started out I thought I wasn't good enough for the genre--- I have very high standards for SF--- and so I started my career elsewhere.  I sold five historical novels before the market for such books collapsed, and I made my first SF sale shortly thereafter.

How do you work when writing a novel?

I'm probably pretty funny to watch.  I'm a very physical writer, so what I generally do is consume caffeinated beverages to excess, put on loud music, and dance or otherwise bounce around until I feel I'm ready to write.  Then I charge to the keyboard and write until the energy flags, after which I start caroming around again.  My wife Kathy is strangely tolerant of this behavior.

You've written quite a few novels and have covered a number of different genres (cyberpunk (Hardwired), space opera (Aristoi), disaster thriller (The Rift), historial adventure (Privateers and Gentlemen) and a number of other books that cross over into the Fantasy realm).  Why have you varied the genre that you write in so much?

There are vast possibilities within the SF genre, and I see no reason why I shouldn't explore all of them.  Besides, staying in the same place all the time is boring, and leads to artdeath.   We can all point at series that have gone on too long, or writers who have stranded themselves in the wrong decade and never advanced.  I have a horror of becoming a bad example to my fellow writers, and so the best way to deal with the possibility is to keep moving and keep trying new things.

Is there a concern that fans of a specific genre might lose interest in you if you step outside their preferred reading area for a period of time?

I think I've managed to gather a corps of readers who are willing to follow me from subgenre to subgenre.  The way to abuse readers' trust is to write bad stuff, which I try not to do...

You've made a significant contribution to Wild Cards, a science fiction anthology set in a shared universe.  What was it like working in this environment and how did you need to modify your writing processes?

In the beginning, Wild Cards was put together by a bunch of young friends who hung out together and happily shared ideas.  On the other hand, since they all had veto power over what you did with their characters, it was sort of like writing stories for 18 different editors all at the same time.  You learned to work and play well with others, or you had a really miserable time.

I was growing fast as a writer during that time, and I got to experiment a good deal with my Wild Cards pieces.  I'm grateful to have had the opportunity.

What's the worst piece that you've written and why?

There are a number of candidates for the honor, including a novel that, with any luck, no one will ever see.  The bad stuff is confined to the lower drawer of a filing cabinet, and occasionally I take out these pieces, shudder, wonder what I was thinking, and put them back.

I don't know why I haven't thrown them out.  Perhaps I have an internal archivist that wants even the wretched stuff to survive, or maybe I think I can still learn something from these efforts other than JUST . . . DON'T . . . DO THAT!

You've been noted as saying that you enjoy writing short stories, but that they don't pay.  What do you find appealing about short story writing that you don't get from a novel?

I'm attracted by the idea of perfection, and short stories can be perfect.  Short fiction is sufficiently compressed so that every word, every sentence, and every paragraph matters.  I flatter myself that I can make a shorter work flawless.
Novels inevitably sprawl out more, and whenever I reread my own novels, inevitably I find that I've failed to express some idea fully, or properly develop a subplot, or I realize that there was a better way to write a particular passage.
Also, I write short works as experiments, just to see if I can pull off a particular technique.  If you've got to have a failed experiment, it's better that it take only a few weeks out of your life rather than, as with a novel, the better part of a year.

I've always thought that my best work has always been in the shorter forms.  Not that I don't like the novels, mind.

'Implied Spaces' has just been published and 'This Is Not a Game' is out next year.  What are you currently working on?  Is 'This Is Not a Game' complete?

I finished "This is Not a Game" in March.  The book should be out in the first months of 2009.   Orbit seems to be planning some major promotion with the book, so I'm hoping that you won't be able to go anywhere early next year without stumbling over a copy.

I'm currently writing some short fiction and contemplating a sequel to "This is Not a Game."

Voice of the Whirlwind definitely falls within the realm of cyberpunk and when the novel was released, cyberpunk was a sub-genre that could be easily defined.  What do you think has happened to cyberpunk over the last fifteen to twenty years?

Cyberpunk has evolved, which--- when you get down to it--- was pretty much what cyberpunk was about.

I'd like to suggest that there were a few key concepts to cyberpunk: the idea that the future would be filled with a tangle of subcultures rather than a single monoculture; the notion that subcultures would adapt technology for their own purposes; that the subcultures would be webbed together by electronic media; and that the future would be saturated by mass media and by messages generated by large corporate entities acting exclusively and without conscience for their own profit and power.

That's not even controversial today.  That's what the future turned into: that's what today is all about.  I had thought I was writing 'Hardwired' about a future that existed sixty or eighty years out, and it turned out that I was writing about the year 2008.

In my view anything written within the parameters described above qualifies as cyberpunk, no matter whether it's outwardly a space opera or a dystopia or a novel set in the Third World.

What do you think the genre of Science Fiction will be like in twenty years time?

Written SF will be a tiny, tiny tail on a Big Media dog.  SF and fantasy will be everywhere in mass media, and written SF will be the province of a tiny subculture of happy, graying fanatics who will persist, in completely futile fashion, in pointing out that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg didn't invent any of this stuff, but ripped it out wholesale from the guts of old pulp novels.

As for me, I'll probably be sleeping on steam grates and selling my books from an old shopping cart.  Because, you know, I just can't help myself.