dht@druri.UUCP (Davis Tucker) (09/30/85)
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...