Chabon is the author of some of my favorite recent books, like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and the rather nutty Summerland. He was also the screenwriter for the upcoming John Carter (which, I gather, is an Edgar Rice Burroughs story about an Emergency Room doctor—wait! Wrong John Carter). Wired interviewed him on their Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast, and printed a transcript at Michael Chabon Attacks Prejudice Against Science Fiction.
As expected, the interview covers a lot of E.R. Burroughs ground, and plenty of other things as well. For instance, as the title suggests, Chabon talks about his own desire to write genre fiction, and how it initially wasn't easy for him to do so:
I had been taught early on in college and graduate school that I wouldn’t be taken seriously if I wrote genre fiction, and not only would I not be taken seriously, but people just really didn’t want to read it, like, my workshop mates and my workshop leaders. I had workshop leaders who just out-and-out said, “Please do not turn science fiction in to this workshop.” That was discouraging, obviously, and if I had had more courage and more integrity, I might have stood up to it more than I did, but I wanted to be read... It wasn’t like I don’t love F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov, and Eudora Welty, and all those people. I love their work just as much — if not more in some cases — as Arthur C. Clarke, or Frank Herbert, or whoever it might have been. So I had just sort of allowed myself to fall into this channel as a writer that at some point I realized I didn’t want to be limited to anymore.
Read the interview. Better yet, read some Chabon!
No comments:
Post a Comment