Squidsquatch. A new interview (almost) every day. A single question. The subject one day becomes interviewer the next.

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Martin Livings: Deb, you’ve been talking a lot about the supposed “death” of both the novel and the genre itself while at the same time you’re working on a speculative fiction novel. Are we really hearing death knells? Is there any point in writing within a dying form?

Deborah Biancotti: Ha! Yeah, it’s kinda perverse to write an SF novel, eh? Crazy.

Oh, I don’t know, death knells, pshaw! Wouldn’t it be nice if we could proclaim the death of the death knell? Wonder we can hear each other speak over all the dying and knelling that’s going on.

Sometimes I think the only way to understand something’s alive is to hear somebody proclaim it dead. It’s like Barney in The Simpsons, spread-eagled under a beer tap. ‘Argh, my heart’s stopped!’ he cries. Then a second later, ‘Naaaaahhh, there it goes!’ And he keeps on drinking.

See, that’s what death knells are. They’re those moments where you stop to reflect & recalculate before you go right on doing whatever it is you were doing before they told you what you’re doing is done.

I mean, ok, genres & forms attract more or less audience over time. And though they may be transformed by that, I don’t think they stop. Hell, they’re still making black & white films nowadays. They’re making musicals & westerns — I’ve no doubt someone, somewhere is even contemplating making a silent film. Railing against the dying of the light, apparently, those freaks. God luv ‘em.

The novel’s not dying. Genre’s not dying. They may be changing – and so they should. Stasis is creative death, & all that (see, that’s where the real death is, in sameness & repetition & repetition — & repetition). I don’t think we need to be afraid of change in form or format when we could let the challenge and potential panic of a new thing invigorate us.

It’s the same for the arts as it is for philosophy, or science, or engineering, or academia. Something new’s going to slap you in the side of the head & you can either fall over wailing or adjust your stance.

And the thing about the format of the novel, or the form of the genre, is that if you take even a cursory look back through their histories you’ll find that from the beginning people have been pushing the boundaries, changing and remaking them. And yet, they refuse to die, right?

Henry Fielding’s JOSEPH ADAMS is a very early novel that, if it was published today, you’d swear was a mildly post-modern experiment. Of course, being such an early example of ‘the novel’, it really was an experiment. But what novel isn’t? An experiment in the chemical reaction between this reader and that writing, this idea and that style, this narrative and that era. It says something about the flexibility of the concept, or the paucity of the label, that there’s so much room for interpretation of the ‘novel’. And the digital age is challenging that all over again. Mark Danielewski credits the unique structure of his novel, HOUSE OF LEAVES, to his education in cinema. Think of the potential that kind of cross-pollination brings!

Same for genre. Magical realism, mundane SF, cinematic brainless/big-budget blockbusters, interstitial arts, gothic fright, quest trilogies, end-of-the-world cautionary tales, supernatural stories of moral rectitude. Hell, Shakespeare told ghost stories. Oscar Wilde, Orson Welles, Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe. Margaret Atwood. Cormac McCarthy. Can’t help themselves.

We’ve told each other genre stories since we were first able to talk. The only way we’re going to stop is if we’re all, you know … dead.

Deborah Biancotti seems incapable of writing a story that doesn’t win an award, a shortlisting, or an honorable mention. She lives in Sydney and hates sports, which is barely forgivable, and works for the government, which is not. Her website is deborahbiancotti.net and her LiveJournal is here.