An Interview with Liz Williams - Page 3
© Debbie Ledesma
DL: Do you attempt to influence the way people view society through
your writing, and if so do you believe SF can have an impact?
LW: Not really-obviously I have values and views, but
I'd rather present these as an emergent property of my fiction rather than using
what I write as a means of preaching to people. I'm more interested in exploring
ideas through my work and perhaps not coming to any very solid conclusions.
I am still figuring out where I stand in a lot of areas and that's a lifelong
process.
DL: Some recent criticism of SF states the genre is dying or has become
stagnant, thus losing readers. What do you think about the current state of
the genre?
LW: I think it's actually pretty vibrant at the moment. There
are a lot of new and interesting people coming onto the scene, a lot of mixing
and matching with genres. I find media SF pretty stagnant (as opposed to media
fantasy), but that's been the case for a long time.
DL: Do you think SF movies and TV series helps the genre or gives the
public the wrong idea about what the literature can be?
LW: The tropes of SF are now familiar to the mainstream, but
the mainstream remains very sniffy about SF-it does the classic double-bind
of marginalising it and at the same time acknowledging it as populist. There
is an awful lot of really bad media SF, but then there's a fair amount of poor
media detective genre, for instance. If people take the trouble to look for
the good stuff, they'll find it, but I'd say that a lot of the things you see
are off-putting.
DL: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
LW: Work, work, work. Read lots. Don't give up (never surrender!).
Keep sending work out even when you think it's going to kill you. Research markets
and above all, be as professional as you can.
DL: What books are you writing for the future?
LW: I have another novel coming out with Bantam in the US in
the fall, titled Nine Layers of Sky, which is a contemporary SF novel
(again with fantasy elements) set in Central Asia. It's due to come out in the
| Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: | View all related messages |
For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to Debbie Ledesma's Science Fiction & Society topic, please visit the Discussions page.