One might expect that I would be in full agreement with Melvin Jules Bukiet’s essay “Wonder Bread” in American Scholar. Bukiet takes on the current crop of Brooklyn-based writers who use fantastical elements in their fiction to achieve a certain style of happy resolution. Among these writers he includes Jonathan Safran Foer, Myla Goldberg, Nicole Krauss, and Dave Eggers, who hail from Brooklyn, and expands his net to include non-Brooklyn writers such as Michael Chabon from San Francisco Bay and Sue Monk Kidd from South Carolina. “Brooklyn is a psychic rather than a geographic designation,” he tells us, at least for the purposes of his literary analysis.

I too have written an essay condemning the lazy use of fantastical plot resolutions. It’s called “The Curse of the Transcendental Happy Ending” and it is due to appear in the next issue of Borderlands. But I am not in the least bit in sympathy with Bukiet. Allow me to explain. My antagonism to the Transcendental Happy Ending is due to it being a lazy cop-out in most instances. The full argument can be read when Borderlands comes out. But this is not to say that all writers and all books that use a Transcendental Happy Ending are lazy cop-outs. If the ending is a natural resolution that follows the logic and tone of the book that leads up to it, then there is nothing wrong with ending this way. I went to great pains in my essay to explain why this distinction is important, but to Bukiet there is no real distinction. Happy endings arrived at by fantastical events are, to Bukiet, bad endings by definition.

Unfortunately, it’s false to all human experience to find “growth” in tragedy. In fact, the dull truth is that pain is tautological. The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering.

But people do find growth in tragedy. They do it all the time. I speak to people every day of my working life who find ways of growing past traumatic events. I also know as a clinician that pain is not tautological and that the biological and emotional purpose of suffering is to teach us to avoid injury. The reason why lepers and diabetics lose toes is that they lose their sense of pain and are unable to prevent injury, which leads to necrosis. That is to say, the very function of pain is learning and self-protection.

Serious fiction, literature, even if it’s fabulist, sharpens reality.

To which I say: who made Mr Bukiet the Pope of Literature? On this score, we can exclude Pynchon, Vonnegut, Carter, Le Guin, Sterne, Cervantes, Ballard, Borges, Calvino, and many other great writers from “serious” fiction.

That’s precisely why their books are more insidious than simpler genre novels wherein people manage to triumph over trauma.

There is no correlation between “simpler” novels, “genre” novels, and triumph over trauma. Some of the simplest genre story forms are apocalyptic and unredemptive — consider post-Romero zombie plots or Planet of the Apes. And on the other hand, many of the canonical works in Western literature resolve on a triumph over trauma. The Odyssey springs to mind. Even Macbeth, one of the most bloodthirsty pieces of melancholia in the Western canon, ends with the restoration of the moral order.

In fact, trauma’s never overcome. That’s what defines it. Your father is dead, or your mother, and so are most of the Jews of Europe, and the World Trade Center’s gone, and racism prevails, and sex murders occur. What is, is. The real is the true, and anything that suggests otherwise, no matter how artfully constructed, is a violation of human experience.

No, that is not the definition of trauma, and exactly which of these authors have gone so far as to resurrect their dead characters, unkill the Jews of Europe, or restore the World Trade Centre? These stories, even with fantastical help, never go so far as to undo trauma. What they are about is coming to terms with it. This does not put these books above criticism. They can still be mawkish and I for one could never bring myself to read The Lovely Bones based purely on its form and subject matter (accordingly, I offer no opinion on its actual qualities as a novel).

Bukiet has praise for only one of the modern wunderkind: Jonathan Lethem. Can’t fault him for that. The problem with Bukiet’s piece is not his choices or the problems he identifies in the novels he discusses, but in the prescriptive way he generates rules for what is good writing and what is bad writing — rules that are even more egregious than the offences he means to condemn. Bukiet’s rules suggest that the best literature is soaked in gloom, the sort of story where everyone is miserable and nobody ever feels better. Nothing on the radio but late Shostakovich and nothing on Broadway but Eugene O’Neill revivals.

The real is real, all right, but what we think is real is not so steadfast; misery and emotional stasis is not the default setting for good fiction; and there is nothing intrinsically simplistic or generic or wrong in stories that end with redemption, peace, or reconciliation.

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Mitch: You have recently up and moved with the family from one end of the country to the other. Has the sea change affected your writing in any way, either in how you write, or what you write about? In any way has the change in latitude changed your attitude?

Chris Lawson: Actually, I moved only halfway up the east coast from Melbourne. People tend to forget how big Queensland is. Despite moving 1800 km north, I am still closer to Melbourne than the northern tip of the country. To put it another way, if you were to take a map of Australia and fold it along the southern Queensland border, the tip at Cape York would go past the bottom of Tasmania and well into the Southern Ocean. And I still live an hour and half from Australia’s third largest city, so it’s not been an enormous upheaval culturally.

Having said that, Melbourne is a remarkable city that I miss a lot. The first time I flew back to Melbourne from our new digs, as I was waiting in line to disembark the plane, a young man ahead of me stepped out of the plane into the open air, threw his arms wide, and shouted “Melbourne! Thank God!” I had to look around to make sure I hadn’t accidentally wandered onto a film set. It was one of those things you expect in a movie about New York or Paris. I understood exactly why he was so pleased to be back home. It’s not just nostalgia or homesickness. There really is something special about the culture in Melbourne. It is possibly the only major melting-pot city in the world that has almost entirely avoided ethnic violence, even between the large Serbian and Croatian communities during the NATO intervention years. In fact, the only serious ethnic strife that Melbourne ever experienced was back in the 1880s gold rushes when the Chinese were none too popular with the English settlers.

There are many things I miss, especially the SF community there and the easy availability of great cons and Slow Glass Books. But the move has been much for the better overall and there are many compensations. We now live in one of the most beautiful parts of Australia, only seven minutes from a great surf beach, and the climate is such that there are almost never any days where you don’t want to go outside. Most importantly, my wife’s health has improved considerably this last year.

Has it affected my writing? Not that I’m aware. Apart from research purposes, there is no need for me to travel to any particular place for my stories, and even then I can get away with fudging it most of the time (almost all of my stories are set in places I’ve never been). On the other hand, the move did absorb much energy, and then there was getting into a new workplace, and starting to teach at the University of Queensland. All this has taken a big bite out of my available mental effort. It’s not so much the latitude as the lassitude. But things are improving. I’ve disappointed myself by missing some deadlines and submission opportunities recently, but there is some stuff brewing that I hope to decant soon.

Chris Lawson is a doctor, teacher, and writer. He is one of the few living Australian writers to have a district named after him. Unfortunately, that district is Wonglepong.

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Deb Biancotti: Mitch, you’re an archetypal renaissance man, with credits in publishing and performance art, a career in layout and design, and a history in the complementary arts of wrestling and competitive dance. Also, you’re very tall. My question is: did you eat all your greens as a child?

Mitch: Now, can I clarify this? Are you asking, ‘As a child, did I eat all of my greens?’ Or ‘Did I eat all my greens as a child?’

Because in relation to the former, the answer would be NO, as I didn’t stop eating vegetables as soon as I reached adulthood. I, in fact, have taken to eating more vegetables the older I get. And when I say more, I mean more in volume and more in variety.

The answer to the latter is again NO for I was quite a fussy eater as a child and did not like anything that wasn’t snack food or dessert. I would blatantly refuse to eat vegetables. It was a battle of wills between my mother and myself. I would be at the table refusing to eat and Mum would be saying that if I didn’t eat the vegies I would have to go without. Let’s just say that Mum’s maternal instinct for not letting her child starve always kicked in well before I ever broke.

Either way, it’s safe to say that only a few ‘greens’ passed my lips in the tender days of my childhood. How that relates to my being ‘very tall’, as you pointed out, is marginal: for out of me and 2 of my cousins (of similar age to myself), I probably ate more greens than they ever did and yet I am the shortest of the 3. In fact, out of my sister and all my cousins, the more vegetables that were eaten, the shorter the person is. Maybe there’s something in that which should be investigated.

So, as to your enquiry about the amount of vegetables eaten in my youth in relation to my height, I think it’s a lot more to do with ‘genes’ instead of ‘greens’

I hope that answers your question sufficiently.

Mitch is perhaps the only person ever to have been forced into the literary establishment by his friends demanding that he edit an anthology. Since that fateful day, the Mitch? books have become the longest-running anthology series in Australian genre history. Mitch does have a surname, but in most situations it is entirely superfluous. Also, he is very tall.

COSMOS magazine has announced its list of the ten best young scientists from Australia. It’s a wonderful idea. As editor Wilson da Silva says, “Australia produces some of the finest scientists in the world, and many of them show exceptional talent early in their careers.” It would be nice if these young scientists received a fraction of the public recognition accorded to athletes and entertainers, and COSMOS is doing a great service to the Australian community by holding these awards.

But one thing troubles me greatly. Of the ten winners announced today, only one is a woman. It is a blight on Australian science that so few women excel at the highest level. The causes are complex and difficult to change, but it’s terribly important that we do so. Even if you are not moved, though you should be, by the argument that on fairness alone women should make up around half of Australia’s best scientists under 40, there remains the pragmatic argument that the world is moving into knowledge economies and for Australia to maintain its living standards we cannot afford to tune out the intellectual energy of half the population.

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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.

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Robin Pen: Martin, you recently spent a year in another country on a grant to be a writer. Can you describe the process by which you obtained the grant and tell us a bit of your experiences there and how you feel now about having had that opportunity?

Martin Livings: The whole of 2006 is a bit of a blur made up of stuff that I never really expected to happen. There’s not much to tell about how I got the Australia Council grant; I applied for it and received it. I had some excellent advice on completing the application from people who had both worked on the council and received the grant previously. Probably the biggest help was Brendan Duffy, a past recipient of the same grant I was applying for, the New Work (Emerging Writers) grant. He sent me a copy of his application, and gave me the single best piece of advice there was - to go for it and ask for the maximum amount available, rather than playing it safe and asking for less. I followed his advice, used his application as a basic template to write my own, and sent it off. I never expected to get it, to be perfectly honest; it was more for gaining experience in writing applications for things like this, though of course I HOPED I’d get the grant. I’m still not entirely sure why I got it, what I did or said that convinced the council that I was worth pouring money into, but I’ll be eternally grateful to them for the opportunities the grant afforded me.

The trip to London itself was going to happen either way, but thanks to the grant I didn’t need to work while I was over there, which gave me my first real taste of the life of a full-time writer. And, frankly, it didn’t suit me that well. I got bored and lonely, especially being so far away from my family and friends and comfort zone. I had my partner, of course, but she was at work earning the bread, while I stayed home and avoided writing wherever possible! But one huge plus of having the grant was the impetus to actually produce something. Without it, I kind of suspect I might have just spent my days watching UK daytime television, walking the streets of Camden Town, and generally having a bang-up jolly wizard time, eh what? But having that money - and the expectations that came with it - really forced me to knuckle down and write a book. It was great having that hanging over me, it gave me the motivation I desperately needed!

My actual experiences in the UK are still clarifying at this point, even months after returning; it’s like a glass of water drawn from the Thames, all cloudy and murky, but give me time and the silt will settle and I’ll be able to make some sense out of it. But I can already feel that it’s changed me, if not my writing. Mark Twain once wrote that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness”, and he wasn’t wrong. Until this trip, the longest I’d ever been overseas was a fortnight, so although I’d vacationed, I’d never really TRAVELLED. It wasn’t even my idea to do this trip; it was something my partner had wanted to do for many years, and I went along for the ride. I’m very glad I did so, though, and I think EVERYONE should do something like this, not just writers wanting to boost their creative juices. It’s telling that George W. Bush had rarely been abroad until he became President; in fact, at the time of his inauguration, he supposedly didn’t even have a valid passport. It’s this international experience that is so essential to accepting other people, other cultures and races, as equal to our own, as the SAME as our own, rather than as some demonised faceless Other. I suspect my experiences in the UK and Europe will be informing not just my writing, but my whole philosophical outlook for the rest of my life. And now, having just bought a house here in Perth, I’m already starting to think about where our next big adventure could be!

Martin Livings is the author of Carnies, a novel that has the rare distinction of being nominated for awards in both horror (Aurealis and Ditmar awards) and crime fiction (Ned Kelly Awards). Martin believes his “second greatest achievement was writing a computer game review to the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody.” He still wonders why it never made it to print. Martin’s website is martinlivings.com.

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Stephen Dedman: How serious a menace is video piracy, in the form of internet downloads, to the movie industry? Is it damaging the viability of cinemas, or is it just a scapegoat for other influences (distributors taking nearly all of the revenue; home theatres with movies legitimately going to DVD or Pay-TV within months or even simultaneously; movies being judged to be not worth the price of the cinema ticket, etc.). What do you foresee the industry trying to do to deal with this problem - and how much longer is the farce of DVD region-coding (even on movies older than I am) likely to last?

Robin Pen: DVD region-coding was originally to control the importing of a title on DVD where cinema release of that film was potentially affected by it. But, it got caught up in the political process of world market deals and it all went pear shaped. Now it’s just a mess that slow processes may clean up eventually while those canny enough to buy a non-region player can quite ignore.

Video piracy does mean loss of revenue, but the loss is not nearly as big as they cry about. Why? Because a good proportion of those buying pirate goods were likely not to purchase that product if only available by legitimate but more expensive means. And, the number of people who download or purchase a Bali rip-off who would’ve spent money to see it legit, if that was the only recourse, are still fewer than those making up the growing numbers of cinema goers and DVD buyers. Sure, it is reasonable to accept that in this culture someone would not be willing to spend money to check a TV show out for the first time and thus will download it to see what their friends or the advertisements are on about. But more often than not, if they felt it is worthy of a second and third viewing they will purchase it to re-experience it with notably superior visual and sound quality and in more comfortable surroundings. The industry is making more money, not less. Big commercial cinema is doing fine and is more profitable than ever when put in conjunction with merchandising and DVD sales.

But where downloading hurts the most is in free-to-air and pay-TV markets. People cannot wait for the next episode of a series download the lot and watch it on their home computers. It’s one of the reasons a show capable of a cult following, usually a science fiction themed program, will all too often end up playing the second half of its first season close to midnight (however, it does have more to do with once you have a loyal market for Buffy or Battlestar Galactica then your ratings will not waver too much regardless of when you put it on). So now the TV networks won’t pay as much as they would have in the past for a hot new series as they can still make good revenue on sport or lazy after work repeats of The Simpsons. But that’s okay as the production companies are still making better profits as DVD sales have generously replaced that lost revenue (and it’s not mush of a loss, if any). And there is argument that the enthusiasm to purchase DVDs of a series was generated by the downloading of episodes. The market is changing but the same money is there and this has been an evolving process throughout all entertainment technologies. It’s always been about adapting to changing markets.

It is true however that Chinese pirate DVDs and downloading have had an influence on rental markets, but from what I hear the rental industry more looks at the longtime nature of the business and operate accordingly. Besides, the pirate market is less of a problem now than in the past and not because of those mandatory anti-piracy spots which are paid for by those like individual DVD rental/retail and cinema businesses who are not pirating. Of interest, there was a notable increase in rental after the Bali bombings as more people changed where they take their holidays. But also the novelty of cheap pirate DVDs is waning steadily as more and more people are finding the poor quality (shaky hand-held in a cinema of bobbing heads or discs with excessive drop out or the packaging is so dodgy that putting it on display in the DVD collection makes one look cheap and tacky) and the frequency of dirty tricks (mislabeling excess discs knowing the purchaser will be in another country before discovering it has some other movie on it) is making those with decent incomes feel spending the money for quality and surety is worth it. It is the same with how the VHS market resulted in more people going to the cinemas cause it worked effectively as a promotion for the cinematic and group sharing experience.

Yes, a new movie has a shorter life span in the fast lane but that has more to do with more product than ever fighting for pole positions. Plus, when in the past people who enjoyed a film in the cinema enough to rent it are now buying it instead. Thus video rental has slipped but is replaced by DVD retail in much the same way that repeat viewing in the cinema (seeing Star Wars over and over) was replaced by people renting or buying a VHS tape. Business is not losing money but seeing it come from different departments. If none of this was the case you would not be seeing the wider range of product in cinemas and on retail shelves made with more expensive production values.

The industry’s push on piracy and downloads is because marketing feels more money is out there to be made, but what losses can be estimated from illegitimate business hasn’t set the industry back any. No one in Hollywood need go without their Lamborghini. But outside of Hollywood, piracy has hurt smaller markets and even destroyed the hopes of film makers. It’s one of the reasons there isn’t a flourishing Turkish film industry. But the desire for world movies is growing and giving hope to more and more film industries in struggling countries. And though festivals and foreign language television networks and the greater demand for DVD variety are a major reason for their growth, the internet culture with downloading and Youtube are also an integral part for the awareness of potential new markets. Bollywood, anime and other Asian cinema may not be as successful as they are today without first being a part of a subculture that could only access this product by illegitimate means.

Robin Pen’s career path as a screenwriter was cut short by being too good, too young (Actual True Story ^[TM]). He subsequently turned his love of movies into one of the most distinctive voices in cinema criticism. Robin is both a hopeless fan of genre cinema, a man who can appreciate blundering, graceless films provided they have a bit of spirit, and a trenchant critic of lazy, cynical filmmaking. His recent criticism has been marked by the appearance of Hampton and Francher, two characters who represent each side of Robin’s viewing personality, and often takes the form of Robin listening in as his two friends argue the toss about a movie. Many of Robin’s earlier essays and reviews have been collected in the cult book The Secret Life of Rubber-Suit Monsters.

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Jonathan Strahan: Your first story was published in 1977, thirty years ago. You’ve had short fiction, collections, and novels published here in Australia, in the US, and elsewhere. Given all of your experience, what do you think it takes for a writer to build a career? Has science fiction, fantasy, and horror publishing changed a lot during your career? And, how does that affect someone starting out today?

Stephen Dedman: Firstly, this depends on your definition of a career. If you mean ‘a living’, then he or she needs to be able to write something that people will want to read, and that at least one publisher will believe that enough people will want to read to make it viable - and to get it to said publisher at the right time. If he/she has no independent income, he/she also needs to do this at a rate that will keep himself/herself alive between cheques - the larger the cheques, of course, the longer he/she can take to write the next thing. There’s a formula I use: E = mc%. E is for ‘Earnings’; m is the minimum number of words you can write every day (alternatively, M=1,000, which is my usual quota); c is the cents per word you get, on average, for the work you sell; % is the percentage of work you sell. If you can fill in all those variables and come up with a living wage, fantastic. If not, don’t quit your day job.

Of course, that’s about as helpful as the Monty Python sketch where they taught you how to play the flute: “You blow there and move your fingers up and down here.” And it comes more from my experience as a bookseller who writes, rather than a writer whose books sell (I wish they did sell well enough that I didn’t have to do anything but write, but they haven’t).

If, however, by ‘career’ you mean continuing to write and publish professionally or semi-professionally over 30 years, then all I can recommend is that you write what you would want to read; write as much as you can as well as you can, and as Hemingway said, some days you may write better than you can. I’d advise against trying to deliberately write crap just because you think that some people will buy it: you might succeed, but I suspect you’ll be facing even more competition than if you were trying to write purely for the pleasure.

Has science fiction, fantasy, and horror publishing changed a lot during your career? And, how does that affect someone starting out today?

Yes. Fantasy publishing has certainly increased, and that’s in number of titles, not just the number of words. Science fiction… I don’t have figures to hand, but while Australian publishers seem to have pretty much given up on it in favour of fantasy, US and British publishers haven’t. Horror has always been a bit player, except of course for Stephen King and a few others.

I’ve been doing this for long enough that I regard the situation with local market and short fiction markets as being rather like Melbourne weather: if you don’t like it, then wait a little while and it will change. When I started writing, there were no paying markets for sf in Australia. They flourished briefly in the mid-80s, then there was two years of nothing again, then Aurealis and Eidolon appeared… Some of the best paying short fiction markets have disappeared since I started, and until Cosmos appeared, no 21st century Australian sf market paid even as well as Aphelion had done 20 years before: most still don’t.

Obviously, the more short story markets there are, then the easier it is for writers to break into the field - especially if most of them pay so poorly that the professionals don’t bother submitting to them. Of course, it’s possible we may go through another slump like that at the end of the 80s, and it may last even longer… OTOH, webzines will probably continue to publish some fiction, though whether they will pay, or attract readers, remains to be seen. But I’m not going to try to predict the future. What do you think I am, a science fiction writer?

Addendum: I just received this Dorothy Parker quote from Writer’s Lifeline: “If you’re going to write, don’t pretend to write down. It’s going to be the best you can do, and it’s the fact that it’s the best you can do that kills you.” She said it better than I could, and said it first, but no great surprise there.

Stephen Dedman is best known for his subtle emotional horror stories, but he has published in a broad range of genres to widespread acclaim, currently co-edits Borderlands, and has served on professional committees and judging panels. He has an employment history that is even more baroque than usual for a writer, including being “an experimental subject and a used dinosaur parts salesman” and currently sells books at Fantastic Planet in Perth. He describes himself as “author of four novels, a non-fiction book and more than 100 short stories, plus reviews, role-playing games, stageplays, essays and editorials. Most of the fiction I’ve written has been speculative, fantastic, or just plain weird, but I’ve also written thrillers, erotica, and westerns. Sometimes all at the same time.” Here is Stephen’s LiveJournal.

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Sean Williams: For years now, people have been predicting that biotech will sweep over SF as the hottest fad. Seems to me, though, that the New Space Opera just keeps on keeping on, with biotech tagging along for the ride in the form of increased lifespans and other items on the post-human wishlist. What’s your take on the future of science fiction (and/or fantasy)? What trends have you seen that might be lurking ahead? Most importantly: are we space opera writers going to be out of a job any time soon?

Jonathan Strahan: Space opera writers are never going to be out of job. The audience for science fiction has grown to the extent that there are enough readers who self-identify with a kind of fiction that they can support the writers who create it.

What has changed is the idea that science fiction is truly in dialogue with itself. What I think is happening is that the centre failed to hold, science itself became too complicated and much less amenable to the simple engineering solutions of Golden Age SF, and there is so much new science fiction being published today that writers can’t read even the major works. That means that a writer today can publish a major cutting edge work and it could have almost no influence on the field because no *writers* read it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a new thing. The days of someone writing a book, everyone reading it, and a bunch of people writing work in response to it are essentially gone.

As to what the trends are: well, the new space opera (the old space opera with a nifty new paint job) will continue to be the traditional heart of science fiction - there’s simply no escaping that adventures with rocketships are the pure quill. However, I think Geoff Ryman’s mundane SF will gain a little more notoriety, while singularity-based SF may be on the wane. Surprisingly maybe, I think the whole steampunk/zeppelin thing may be the next major trend after all. It’s fun, it’s full of cool engineering stuff that guys like. It’s sort of like the fun of Golden Age SF without having to deal with all that annoying real science. I think over the next couple years we might see quite a few steampunk books and stories. As to biotech - didn’t we already do that? <g>

Jonathan Strahan is one of the most respected editors in the genre. He co-founded and co-edited Eidolon, arguably the most impressive small press magazine in sf history. He worked as assistant editor at Locus: The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field, for which he still acts as Reviews Editor from the other side of the world. In recent years Jonathan has edited and published a string of acclaimed anthologies and collections and has another ten in the pipeline to 2009. Everything Jonathan publishes is of outstanding quality, from single-author collections to massive anthologies and annual Best-Of wranglings. His blog is Notes from Coode Street.