Paul DiFillipo
Q-1.
Do you think a certain generation gap really exists, or, if not exactly a gap, do you feel some kind of distance between veterans who started their careers before 1960s and the younger generation Y in our genre, at least?
A-1.
I do believe that there are certain attitudinal and perspectival (is that even a word?) differences between the youngest writers of SF, and some older ones. However, I would place the demarcation line circa 1989, to the birth and surge of the internet and the web, the death of communism, and the flourishing of a kind of postmodern capitalism. Every SF author who debuted prior to 1989, even including rebels like the cyberpunks, operated under the old genre paradigms relating to goals, publishing methodologies, outsider solidarity, etc. But those who began to publish--at whatever personal age, but the younger the better--in the 1990s and beyond share a radically different outlook deriving from such factors as the domination of films by the fantastic, post-feminism, the existence of a dedicated cable channel for SF, the ubiquity of porn, the death of genre magazines, blogging, and a thousand other factors, most of which I myself, at age 54, could possibly not even identify.
Q-2.
Do you think the general atmosphere for the genre is less passionate now than, say, thirty years ago? I know there are fewer voters for the Hugo, and even those voters usually vote for their favorite works now, rather than the ones we can boast about as the representative masterpieces of the genre that particular year, as cornerstones of SF history.
A-2.
Once the SF ghetto opened up, the passion perforce had to leak out. There is no way that a mere dalliance can be as passionate as a lifetime love affair between soul mates--an affair derided by the world at large. Does this mean that the importance of SF is less? Maybe the cumulative lesser devotion to SF among millions is greater than the core devotion from a few thousand.
Q-3.
Has fandom changed? Or is it writers who have changed? What are the things that concern them most? They used to be the moon, rockets, a-bombs, wars, urbanization, etc.
A-3.
I had a brief but fairly substantial involvement with zine-based fandom during the 1970s, and I think that culture is pretty much dead, although it migrated to the web to some degree--but with major changes. British fandom seems to retain some of the old flavor, from what I can see as an outsider. But there are still readers and viewers who are passionate about individual items--witness the explosion of fan fiction online. However, the sense of being a lonely fan-who-is-really-a-slan, allied against the "mundanes," seems to have evaporated. Maybe everyone at Worldcon can summon up such a feeling. But certainly not the heterogenous crowd at San Diego Comiccon.
Q-4.
What do you think about the current state of SF? How do you like recent works by the newer generation of writers? Who is your favorite among them, or writers to watch? Can you recommend them to your personal friends who have never read our genre?
A-4.
I think there is an astonishing amount of talent today, at least as much as in other eras, if not more. I try to keep up with newer writers, and find many of them to be wonderful on a sentence by sentence level, even if they're missing some of the gonzo conceptual freedom of an A. E. van Vogt. I think it would be easy to recommend something like Slattery's Liberation or Barzak's One for Sorrow to any intelligent non-genre reader.
Q-5.
Which of your works would you like to be read by Japanese readers?
A-5.
I think readers in Japan might enjoy my books A Mouthful of Tongues or Cosmocopia.
Q-6.
What is your current work? Your next project?
A-6.
I just finished a novelette titled "Yes We Have No Bananas". If editor Jonathan Strahan likes it, it will appear in his anthology Eclipse #3. My next project is to do the sequel to A Year in the Linear City, to be titled A Princess of the Linear Jungle.
