First published in Interzone, Issue 218 (September/October 2008).
How does it feel to see your stories gathered together in a printed collection?
I’m extremely proud of this collection. It represents one of the busiest periods of my life: five years in which I got married, became a father of two, worked my ass off at a full-time job, gained a qualification in marketing, and still somehow found the time to write!
Is the growing acceptance of web-based fiction magazines a good thing?
For writers, online publication offers instant feedback. Most webzines have their own discussion forums where readers can offer their opinions and debate the relative merits of each story, and getting feedback this way can be a useful learning experience. However, you have to make sure you only submit your very best work, because many of those websites will still be online in five or 10 years’ time, and you don’t want to be continually embarrassed by a sub-standard story that just won’t go away.
Do you enjoy writing short stories, or are they just a step towards longer work?
Short stories let you experiment with style and setting, to try out different ways of writing in order to find your own voice before you embark on a longer work. They also give you the chance to build up your reputation and make contacts within the industry — contacts that will prove very useful when you’re trying to sell your first novel. That said, I still love reading and writing them for their own sake, and will continue to do so. There are some stories that can only be told in the short form and, for me, short stories — and magazines like Interzone that publish them — have always been at the heart of the science fiction genre, much more than in so-called mainstream literature.
SF is sometimes derided for making ‘the idea’ the ‘hero’. Your own stories invariably turn on human relationships, so what attracts you to write SF?
To be honest, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to write SF. I grew up with it, and remember Apollo 18 docking with a Russian Soyuz module when I was four years old. SF has always been about what it means to be human in an increasingly strange and baffling world. My job as a science fiction writer is to examine how technologies are changing the ways in which we interact with each other, and I believe the best way to do that is through the eyes of flawed and sympathetic characters in believable relationships.
Your first novel, Silversands, will be published next year. How did you find working on a larger scale?
Actually, I wrote the first draft of the novel before I wrote the majority of the stories in The Last Reef, and then went back and rewrote it using what I’d learned while writing them. At around 50,000 words, it’s a relatively short novel, but I’m very proud of it and — like the stories in The Last Reef — I put a lot of myself into it.
© paulfcockburn
