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From: dht@druri.UUCP (Davis Tucker)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Excerpts From Brian Aldiss interview
Message-ID: <1177@druri.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 29-Sep-85 19:03:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: druri.1177
Posted: Sun Sep 29 19:03:51 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 30-Sep-85 03:22:00 EDT
Organization: AT&T Information Systems Laboratories, Denver
Lines: 56

EXCERPTS: "Brian Aldiss: Helliconia Calling", by Mike Barson
HEAVY METAL, October 1985
____________________________________________________________________________

HM: ...Now that it's complete, are you pleased... with the Helliconia trilogy?

BA: Oh, yes... part of the impulse to write Helliconia was to get on my horse
again and write a big, solid novel that *no* one could say wasn't sf.

HM: Which was the charge leveled at some of your experimental novels, such as
"Report On Probability A". Did the controversy and criticism bother you?

BA: Not really. With "Report"... I knew what I wanted to do in it, and I feel
I did it... Perhaps it was just too much of a surprise. I'd always thought 
science fiction was *about* surprise; that a novel that took you by the throat
was what everyone loved. It was what *I* loved most - that wonderful sense of
dislocation that the best sf induced... Well, I miscalculated. In England they
hated it; over here there was just a stunned silence. Everyone was asking "What
is this shit Aldiss *doing*? He's finished; it's all over; he can't even think
of a bloody ploit." It was really quite funny, the vehemence of the plot. But
now, "Report" is in its fifth printing, which proves what I've always thought:
the science fiction readership is willing to keep working at something until
they understand it. They're extraordinarily hungry for an intellectual chal-
lenge.

HM: What about the shags [hacks] of today? Do you see a strong field out 
there now producing vital, original works of science fiction?

BA: ...at the moment, there seems to be a great deal of stagnation in the
field. No natural subversives have popped up to take the place of Phillip
K. Dick... What I loved mot about him was, he had the pure quill, and he
never deserted science fiction.

HM: There seems to be a lot of back-to-the-bsics sf... these days, stuff that
consciously is striving for the feel of the thirties.

BA: Nostalgia doesn't interest me; it's an awful disease, and everyone today
seems infected with it... It's very insular, and it doesn't talk to the world
as the best sf should.

HM: And then there's fantasy...

BA: Fantasy really is literature for teenagers. Teenagers don't have a lot of
money, but what they do have is a lot of time. So they'll read all nine vol-
umes of Stephen Donaldson, or whomever...

HM: You once... [said] that all genres eventually wear out... do you see that
already happening?

BA: ...now, I don't look upon science fiction as a genre at all. Rather, it
*contains* genres: space opera, the catastrophe novel, and so on... The term
"sf" is just a publishing category. There's no reason why authors need to
subscribe to someone's limitation of the term. If you think of science fiction
as a *mode*, it's much easier to write. That way one can move from one mode to
another without having to worry whether or not he's writing science fiction...


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