Are there still some goals or plateaus you want to reach that you haven’t attained yet?

Oh yeah, certainly. I’m never set, although I can’t tell you what they are, only that I’m never satisfied with these books. If I’m very, very satisfied they would be about seventy-five per cent of what they might have been. The book I’m working on now is the end of some aspect of my work, I’m not sure what to call it. And the next one I think will be very different, but I haven’t a clue what that will be.

I keep feeling that there’s a kind of book that hasn’t been written that I want to write now, in the same way that when I wrote Neuromancer there was a kind of book that hadn’t been written that I wanted to write in 1983. That was really the impulse there, the sense that there was something missing that was needed in the world. When I wrote Neuromancer I knew it had to be sort of like The Stars My Destination and sort of like Robert Stone’s Dark Soldiers and sort of like a Velvet Underground album. I had a whole list of things it had to be sort of like, and if it all went together it would become one of those seamless pop artefacts that sort of resemble everything and nothing at the same time.

– An Interview With William Gibson by Edo Van Belkom (1998)

I have been looking for this quote subconsciously for the past few days, and just now as I am about to head to bed (it is 01:11 as I write this) and Lou Reed (Caroline Says II) shuffles into playing, I find it.

Critics constantly complain that writers are lacking in standards, yet they themselves seem to have no standards other than personal prejudice for literary criticism. (…) such standards do exist. Matthew Arnold set up three criteria for criticism: 1. What is the writer trying to do? 2. How well does he succeed in doing it? (…) 3. Does the work exhibit “high seriousness”? That is, does it touch on basic issues of good and evil, life and death and the human condition. I would also apply a fourth criterion (…) Write about what you know. More writers fail because they try to write about things they don’t know than for any other reason.

– William S. Burroughs, ‘A Review of the Reviewers’

Genre is that dubious bargain whereby the reader is offered (for our present purposes) a novel, a form whose very name promises a new experience, but offers, in genre, the implicit and crucial promise of the repetition of previous pleasures.

– William Gibson (Sui Generis: A Testimony, his introduction to Rudy Rucker’s WareTetralogy)

Interesting point of view, no? What do you think?

Storm: In SF Horizons, Brian Aldiss wrote that “Ballard is seldom discussed in fanzines.” Time has certainly proved him wrong, and now you are one of the most discussed people in fandom. What do you think of fandom itself?

Ballard: I didn’t know that was the case, because I never see any fanzines. I don’t have any contact with fans. My one and only contact with fandom was when I’d just started writing, which is twelve years ago, when the World Science Fiction Convention was being held in London, in 1957, and I went along to that as a young new writer hoping to meet people who were interested in the serious aims of science fiction and all its possibilities. In fact there was just a collection of very unintelligent people, who were almost illiterate, who had no interest whatever in the serious and interesting possibilities of science fiction. In fact I was so taken aback by that convention that I more or less stopped writing for a couple of years. Since then I’ve had absolutely nothing to do with fans, and I think they’re a great handicap to science fiction and always have been.

– J.G. Ballard Interviewed by Jannick Storm

I have been considering unsubscribing my RSS feed from sites like tor and io9 for a while now.

My problem is that when I look at a science fiction magazine I want to see an object that just shimmers and crackles with the electrical charge of speculative conception. Something with the spark of the new.

— Warren Ellis (Bad Signal 9/1/07)

I have been mining my archive of Warren Ellis’s defunct but wonderful mailing list Bad Signal. There’s an interview with J.G. Ballard that I intend to post some extracts from later on SF magazines. This is all related.

Will

Edit:

More from Bad Signal. People need to read this material

* In clicking around, I discover a word. Fantastika.
Fantastika appears to be the Russian word for
speculative, slipstream or science fiction. Isn’t that
a gorgeous word? Fantastika. Much better than
fantastique. Fantastique is arch. Fantastika is
spiky.

* “What do you write?” “I write FANTASTIKA. And I
just shagged your wife until she saw God. Get away
from me now, shitbreath.”

* Steven McDonald just said to me, “SF should be prone
to seizures and periods of self-wetting mania in which it
tears the shit out of its surroundings. The moments
where SF has been turned into a gibbering surreal
catastrophe have been some of the best.” And I can’t
disagree, really.

* FANTASTIKA!

— Warren Ellis (Bad Signal 16/1/07)