Interview

Recently ran into Dr. Tyson at a holiday party and recorded this interview with him with my cell phone. All apologies about the quality.

Dr. Tyson graciously answers some questions about scientific topics.

Some context:
The Willamette meteor at the museum is considered holy by the Clackamas tribe of native Americans, who were upset when the museum cut off a part of the meteor for research.

Potentially Earth-like planets were recently discovered by the Kepler team: http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/1222/Earth-like-planets-How-will-we-know-if-they-can-sustain-life-VIDEO

Scientists at the CERN supercollider discovered a new particle in their search for the Higgs-Boson: http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/science-and-technology/2011/12/22/large-hadron-collider-scientists-discover-new-particle-as-search-for-god-particle-goes-on-86908-23654100/

Once again I interviewed many wonderful people at ReaderCon, though I aimed for fewer interviews with more in depth questions this time. Click "Read More" for video interviews with Junot Diaz, Samuel R. Delany, Barry Malzberg, John Clute, Kelly Link, Neil Gaiman and Neil Clarke!

An interview with Larry Marder, creator of Beanworld and former CEO of Image Comics, talks about a most peculiar comic book experience, 25 years of anthropomorphic beans and making comics vs. running a comics company.

Larry Marder's Website: http://larrymarder.blogspot.com/

I've been a fan of Beanworld since I first discovered it as a kid, and you will not find a stranger, more giddily wonderful comic.

ReaderCon is the science fiction and fantasy convention devoted specifically to books and reading, and attracts some of the best authors in the field (and in some cases, out of it). Below are my interviews, mostly about the future of publishing and genre, conducted with (in chronological order) Gavin Grant, Charles Stross, Barry Malzberg, Cathrynne M. Valente, Junot Diaz, Samuel R. Delany, Elizabeth Hand, John Clute, John Kessel, Alexander Jablokov, Ted Chiang, Gary K. Wolfe and Peter Straub.

This is part of my series on the work of Michael Moorcock.

Today marks the 70th birthday of Michael Moorcock, and for more the vast majority of those years the man has been publishing fiction read by millions. For more on his career, refer to my review of The Best of Michael Moorcock, from earlier in this series. Our interview took place via email over the course of a few months, and ranged widely in topics, including genre, ethics, feminism, imitation, comics, Jung and more.

In my initial email to him, I described my own introduction to his work. Normally, I would edit this sort of thing out of the interview, but I leave it here because it becomes important to his initial responses. In some cases where multiple questions were asked in one email and responded to in another, I spliced the emails together, or moved follow ups next to the questions they referenced, to make the whole thing read more fluidly. I apologize for any clumsiness caused by this technique.

Michael Moorcock's most recent book is Elric: In the Dream Realms.

Purchase the books from Indiebound:

This past weekend I interviewed Jeff VanderMeer during his national book tour. He is a writer known for fusing Post-Modern literary sensibilities with fantasy and genre tropes. His most recent books are the fantasy noir Finch and Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer.

His website can be found at http://www.jeffvandermeer.com

The interview has been broken down into four parts.

Note: In this portion of the interview I refer to the "grey caps", a non-human species in the Ambergris books (City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword and Finch), as "a kind of intelligent fungus". VanderMeer told me later this was not exactly right, they are not fungus but some other sort of non-human creatures.

One of my favorite writers, Michael Moorcock, recently did an interview with the readers at BoingBoing, and just wow:

The reason for using newspaper reports and other quotes is not because I approve of those quotes but because they replace exposition and show the 'subject' speaking for itself. Readers aren't asked to agree or disagree with the quotes. The quotes demonstrate what I'm trying to get at. By setting a story about, say, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Russia (from The Tank Trapeze, 1968) against a cricket match in Mandalay, I can make comparisons between various forms of imperialism and authoritarianism while also achieving a particular kind of distance.

Go read the whole thing.

This is my interview at BEA with Brian O'Leary of Magellan Media, who has been studying the effect of free ebooks and ebook piracy on publishing. (Please forgive my amateurish interview style.) The interview was filmed by Ed Champion, and his excellent analysis is available on his site.

SF in Conversation: Epilogue

This is the final part of an email conversation I had with Matt Cheney about the state of Speculative Fiction. Read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5.

This is part 5 of an email conversation I had with Matt Cheney about the state of Speculative Fiction. Read part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4. Some things discussed: the dark heart of aesthetics, zombie movies, literary greatness and William Shakespeare.