Chatting With Gary K. Wolfe.

I work in an office during the day and I spend a lot of time filing paperwork. Usually when I’m filing I’ll put a podcast on my phone and listen. There’s a couple that I frequent regularly: Flophouse, How Did This Get Made, Nerd Poker, and most importantly (for this post at least) The Coode Street Podcast.

The majority of those podcasts are essentially straight comedy. One is a D&D campaign but it’s played by comedians so I count it as comedy. The Coode Street Podcast has actual substance which is nice when you’re mindlessly putting paper into folders. It’s hosted by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe. They talk about science fiction, mostly in a literary sense, and always have some very interesting things to say or points to make. They’ll have authors on as well to talk about their works. My favorite episodes have been this one and this one where they talk about the idea of a science fiction canon and the idea of a personal canon. They’re both very well spoken men without coming across as stuffy and boring. There’s humor in their conversations and for the most part I agree with a lot of their opinions (always helpful when listening to something).

The other day I had the intense pleasure of speaking with Gary K. Wolfe and asking him some questions.

Interview with Gary K. Wolfe

Me: You’ve been writing for Locus Magazine for a long time. You’ve won awards, been nominated for Hugos, and are generally considered kind of an expert in the science fiction field. It’s obvious to anyone who reads anything you’ve written or listens to you speak that you have a great love for the genre. Where did that come from? What sparked your interest in science fiction?

Gary: That’s an interesting question. I think it comes from the same place as lots of young readers where I was looking for something that was more interesting than what I was being given in school. I liked science and was fascinated by astronomy. I was interested in these books that had more to do with the changing world.

Me: Where did you find the books to read? I remember the first book that I read that was distinctly science fiction in my mind my dad gave me. It was one of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Venus Stories. I just remember reading it and thinking it wasn’t like anything else I had ever experienced. I was, like, eleven.

Gary: That’s the story of a lot of precocious readers. A parent who’s a reader gives them books. I didn’t have that experience. Mostly I went to the library, and you could also find paperback pulp novels fairly easily back then. The first book I remember buying for myself was a paperback copy of The Illustrated Man. Mostly it was the library. I remember having a fight with my father over getting permission to go into the adult portion of the library.

 

Me: As someone who has been a part of the science fiction community for awhile now how would you say the community has changed over the years? Or does being a science fiction fan feel the same as it did when you first started going to conventions and such?

Gary: Well, I was never really a part of the community as a fan. My first conventions were academic like the Science Fiction Research Convention. And maybe you’ve noticed it but that tends to be the way that science fiction works. The science fiction fandom is a relatively small portion of the community itself. It’s a lot of authors who have never really participated in fandom until their own works come out. But, and Jonathan and I have spoken about this on the podcast, the thing that’s changed the most is diversity. There’s more women and people of color and gay and trans people. It’s not just a bunch of middle-aged white men anymore which is good.

Me: I was reading “The Cold Equations” the other day and was, like, totally blown away by it. Like, I expected there to be some sexism and stuff because it’s an older work. But the main character was so distraught and didn’t know what to do because he was going to have to kill a girl but he would have been fine killing a boy. I was like “wow”.

Gary: That story suffers from a lot of other things as well. It was considered the definitive for hard science fiction because it was this cold, compassionless pure logic thing. But the original ending, which was changed thankfully, actually has the pilot saving the girl or something. There’s some good critiques about it online.

Me: Yeah, I read the critical essays before reading the story which I guess is the backwards way to go about it but they are good.

Gary: If you want something even worse and more sexist you should listen to the radio adaptation.

Me: You’re a professor at Roosevelt University's Evelyn T. Stone College of Professional Studies. I’m currently finishing up my undergrad at Fordham University’s college of professional and continuing studies myself. Working in academia as you do have you found that there are negative preconceptions of genre fiction?

Gary: Absolutely. I think things have gotten a little better. But I suspect that if I had started out regularly in the English department it would have been extremely difficult for me to switch into science fiction. I suspect the bias comes from the fact that dramatic realism is still the expected technique. Everyone is still caught up with the Victorian standard of the novel. Even in creative writing programs in universities you’ll have professors stating specifically that they don’t want to see genre fiction, no science fiction or fantasy or horror or romance.

Me: That’s definitely the case. I was in a creative writing class for poetry and when I wrote science fiction poems they were not readily encouraged.

Gary: Some universities cater to this more and more but they’re still the outliers. Everyone still just wants writing that looks like it belongs in The New Yorker.

Me: Are there specific books or even films that you recommend to combat this attitude?

Gary: Probably Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a little bit different with film though because if you look at all the top grossing movies most of them are science fiction! But you rarely, if ever, see any science fiction books on bestsellers list.

Me: I was just talking to someone about this! How people will see these really popular movies—like Jurassic Park—and won’t call them science fiction because they’re “popular and good” but it’s like… um, that’s fictional science.

Gary: What? Oh wow. I mean, I could find some science fiction writers who wouldn’t want to call it science fiction just based on how bad the science alone is. But there is this idea that science fiction isn’t something you can take seriously. People don’t even like to consider Star Wars because it’s more space opera and has fantasy elements. And it gets hard when you’re trying to rectify how the Force works versus actual science.

Me: I consider Star Wars science fiction. It takes place in space. It’s a simplification but… it’s science fiction. And I think that it’s a really good place for introducing people to the genre. Especially like kids or something. One of my first memories is watching Star Wars. I mean, I was like three so I didn’t understand it but I remember the droids. I remember watching the droids.

Gary: See, I think you’re unusual in that. A lot of people who are watching the movies aren’t also reading the books. There’s this gap where people will watch these things but they won’t pick up books about them because books are still supposed to be serious.

Me: That’s true. I’ve noticed it especially with adaptations of science fiction books to movies. Like, things get changed a lot of the time. The tones are all different.

Gary: You take the two Total Recall movies and after the first ten minutes the Phil Dick story is over! They’re just taking the settings of the stories and using them for what they want. I stumbled across an adaptation of Radio Free Albemuth and it was probably the most true to work thing I’d ever seen adapted from his stuff. Of course, that just raises the question of should you really be adapting a Phil Dick story so faithfully.

Me: There are lots of things in modern society and culture—particularly technologically speaking—that are practically torn from the pages of science fiction. This interview right now is a good example of that. This is a “world of tomorrow” kind of instance that has become extremely common place and mundane for us. Do you feel that science fiction of the past that didn’t succeed in predicting our today has less value because of that? Or can something that totally missed the mark still provide something important?

Gary: No. I don’t think any science fiction writer ever set out thinking they were going to predict the future. And certainly no one talks in terms of their success by keeping track. Science fiction is always more concerned with the time period it’s being written in. These things come across as being predictive but they’re really just stories about what people were worried about at the time. Questions about just what it is to be human. The Space Merchants written in the 50s talks about advertising agencies that control the world and that’s what they were worried about happening back then. The Machine Stops was written in 1909 and it’s about a society living underground communicating, essentially, with Skype and video calls and such. A Logic Named Joe takes telephones and typewriters and television and combined it all together and formed a story that was about the internet before it was ever an idea. There aren’t a lot of stories back then that came up with the internet. The predictions are accidental.

I had a really enjoyable time speaking with Gary. Obviously because I was talking about the stuff I love talking about the most, but also because he was very easy to talk to. It’s always a relief when people more established in the fields you’re interested in wind up being friendly people.