Fantastic Metropolis

Jeffrey Ford: You write a monthly book review column for the magazine Realms of Fantasy. This must put you in pretty close contact with what is going on in speculative fiction these days. What kinds of trends have you noticed, if any? What is your assessment of the general quality of the work being published? What aspects of it excite you and what do you find less than satisfactory?

Paul Witcover: If Sturgeon were alive and reviewing today, he would have to up his percentage of crap considerably, for a couple of reasons. First is the prevalence of gaming and movie tie-ins, almost all of which are bad. And even if well-written, they are pernicious in effect. Next is the flood of self-published, print-on-demand books, which by and large are even worse, with a few notable exceptions involving work too daring or outrageous or strange to find a mainstream publisher or even a small press publisher. So that’s kind of depressing, as is the fact that as far as mainstream and reputable small press work goes, Sturgeon’s law applies as much as ever. But there is still a lot of interesting, praiseworthy work being done today, and in fact I think we’re seeing something of a revitalization of fantasy, or of different branches of the genre. There is the Tolkienesque fantasy, which George R.R. Martin was the first to really substantially advance, I think. Other writers have followed him in this project of both going back to the intense world-building of Tolkien and moving beyond him in literary craftsmanship and in the idea of what, exactly, heroic or epic fantasy can be or should be. I’m thinking particularly of Steven Erikson and R. Scott Bakker here. Cecilia Dart-Thornton is writing epic fantasies that are fascinating in their radical embrace of the traditional. Then there’s a branch that more or less explicitly repudiates Tolkien and takes for its models writers like Peake, Moorcock, M. John Harrison, Vance, and so on. Writers in this camp are people like Miéville and K. J. Bishop. My good friend Ysabeau Wilce’s first novel will be published soon, and though I won’t be reviewing it, I’ll predict here that it will take the genre by storm; her voice and world are among the most unique and compelling I’ve ever encountered. Then there is the branch of urban fantasy brought into being almost single-handedly by Crowley in Little, Big. I feel that Liz Hand is the outstanding practitioner here. But I don’t want to be too dogmatic. What’s interesting to me is how the best writers draw from a number of traditions to fashion something that feels new: Lucius Shepard, Gene Wolfe, Kelly Link, Crowley himself, and Harrison, and Hand: all of these writers are pointing the way forward in fantasy, and a lot of younger writers are starting to follow their lead. It’s an exciting time to be a reviewer.

Jeffrey Ford: What are your writing habits?

Paul Witcover: I’m up at 5:30 in the morning. I grab breakfast, brew coffee, get the headlines off the internet, and am at work by 6. I work with as much quiet as is possible in a small New York City apartment across the street from a fire house; I even use a white-noise generator. I write until about 9:30 or 10, then I’m pretty much done with my own stuff for the day. The rest of the time is devoted to the freelance work that actually pays my bills, some of which is relatively creative and fun, and some of which is drudgery.

Jeffrey Ford: I don’t think most readers are aware of the fact that you wrote a biography of Zora Neale Hurston for younger readers. How did that project come about? You commented to me that her life would make an incredible movie. Why?

Paul Witcover: Andy Duncan published a story called “Zora and the Zombie” in SciFiction last year. It’s set during one of Hurston’s folklore-gathering expeditions to Haiti, and there’s very little in the story, including its fantastic elements, that couldn’t be true. That’s the kind of life Hurston had; she seemed to radiate a reality-distorting field around her. I got the gig through a friend of mine who was also doing YA books on black Americans for the same publisher—Terry Bisson did a few books in the series as well. I chose Hurston because I was an admirer of her work, and because I felt that there was something a little too self-serving about Alice Walker’s well-publicized rescue of Hurston from literary obscurity. I wanted to do something for her memory that wasn’t tainted by self-promotion or by the desire to tailor her life into an exemplary or inspirational tale “for today’s youth,” as they say. Hurston’s life was inspirational and exemplary, but on her own terms, which were very much politically incorrect and more self-serving even than Alice Walker at her most grandiose. It pains me to say so, but if she were alive today, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Hurston were a big-time Bush supporter. She’s most famous for Their Eyes Were Watching God, a wonderful book, but Moses, Man of the Mountain, which retells the story of Moses in an African-American setting and vernacular, is powerful and strange. And her folklore collections, Tell My Horse and Mules and Men, are books of value to anyone who wants to write fantastic fiction about America.