The New Yorker's First All-Sci-Fi Issue: Q&A with the Editor
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The 1874 book cover of classic science fiction novel "Journey to the Center of the Earth." The New Yorker magazine will publish an all-sci-fi issue on Monday (May 28).
CREDIT: This image is public domain in the U.S. {{PD-US}} |
The New Yorker is sending out its first-ever issue devoted to science fiction on Monday (May 28). The magazine's previous summer fiction issues have often had themes, but not usually genres. There's been a "20 writers under 40" issue, for example; several debut fiction issues and once, an India-themed edition.
One of the upcoming pieces that's gotten some attention is an 8,500-word story, by Jennifer Egan, written entirely in paragraphs of 140 characters or fewer. Twitter handle @NYerFiction will publish the story, Tweet by Tweet, every night from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. EDT until June 2. You can read the details elsewhere. What interested us most is seeing science fiction in the one of the most reputable literary magazines in the U.S.
Science fiction has inspired scientists and innovators for generations. Mae Jemison, the first woman of color to travel to space, told InnovationNewsDaily that Lieutenant Uhura on "Star Trek" was a role model for her. Many inventors and NASA scientists have credited Arthur C. Clarke, author of "2001: A Space Odyssey," for inspiring them.
The literary world traditionally hasn't embraced the label as much. The New Yorker has published science fiction-like stories for decades, but hasn't always called them that, said the magazine's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. InnovationNewsDaily talked with her about why the magazine decided to publish a science fiction issue now, where science fiction fits in the literary world and what readers can expect to see Monday. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.
InnovationNewsDaily: What does it mean to have a science fiction issue? Is everything going to be sci-fi?
Deborah Treisman: We do a fiction every year in late May or June. Sometimes we give that issue a theme, sometimes we make it just more generally a literary issue. This year we gave it a science fiction theme. Almost everything in it does follow that theme.
IND: Why did you decide to do a sci-fi issue now?
DT: It feels as though it's sort of in the air. So many of the writers whose fiction we regularly publish have been influenced by science fiction or have been influenced by other so-called genre fiction readings that they did, whether now or earlier in their lives.
It comes up a lot in the issue, actually, this notion of the difference between literary fiction and genre fiction and we kind of felt as though maybe that distinction is not as cut and dried as people make it out to be. We thought it would be interesting to explore the idea and also the fiction.
IND: What's going to be in the sci-fi issue?
DT: We have four pieces of fiction, all of which are sci-fi of some form or another. We have an essay by Anthony Burgess that he wrote in 1973, but wasn't published in his lifetime, on "A Clockwork Orange" and his philosophical thinking around "A Clockwork Orange," his notion of free will and the nature of evil. Then we have an essay by Colson Whitehead, a memoir about his childhood and his obsession with B movies and what he learned from watching B movies.
We have this series of short pieces by writers about their first experiences with sci-fi. They're sort of memoirs. They're short memoirs. We have pieces by Margaret Atwood and William Gibson and Ray Bradbury and Ursula Le Guin and China Miéville and Karen Russell.
We have a "books" piece about aliens in fiction and a TV review of "Dr. Who."
So there's a lot going on in the issue.
IND: What have you learned from putting together this issue?
DT: I've certainly learned about the difficulty that writers have with the ways in which they're classified. Some of the people who wrote pieces about their experiences with science fiction were testy about the notion of being categorized as sci-fi writers or as anything else.
IND: How did people feel about being put in this sci-fi issue? That would be a label.
DT: I repeat, it's not a shameful label. This is nothing to be embarrassed about. It's a legitimate form of writing, a legitimate form of fiction that I think encompasses things from the most blatant mass-market paperbacks to highly literary, intellectual writing.
To me, the category is so broad, there's no way for it to be an insulting one. And it's just full of potential.
IND: Do you think more people now think of science fiction as a legitimate fiction form, compared to the past?
TD: I hope so. That'd be wonderful to have that kind of influence on it.
IND: Have you noticed more of your writers now are influenced by science fiction, compared to past writers?
DT: I go back here only for 15 years, so I can't speak for decades ago, but I think that science fiction stories have always been published in The New Yorker. They just haven't maybe been called that.
The definition of science fiction is a vague one. For me, it involves creating a world within a piece of fiction that is, in several ways, remarkably not our world. I think that encompasses many, many, many possibilities.
To some extent, all fiction is about imagined worlds, so where you draw the line and call something sci-fi is hazy to me. But there have definitely been things that are extremely imaginative, that are set in the future or that imagine technology or forms of life that we aren't familiar with. Stories about those things have been in The New Yorker for decades.
So I think there are quite a few fiction writers now, literary fiction writers who grew up reading science fiction, who grew up reading comic books, who grew up not making distinctions between these genres.
IND: Is that particular to this generation of writers?
DT: I don't think so, because when you get the issue, you'll read pieces by Ray Bradbury and William Gibson, who are not in the young generation of writers anymore. They grew up reading this stuff.
You'll read Laura Miller's piece on when aliens started appearing in writing and I think she pins it to the 19th century.
So it's been around. It's not an entirely contemporary thing.
IND: Do you think recent popular books, such as "Game of Thrones" or "Hunger Games," have made science fiction more mainstream now?
DT: I think there are always books that especially, young readers will go crazy for. You can go back to the "Lord of the Rings" and all that. Every generation has its books in this zone and there's something appealing to young readers about this kind of imagination.
IND: Is there anything special about science fiction writing now?
DT: I think perhaps what's more recent is the impulse to subvert the distinctions between the genres and to pull something from one side of the line into something from the other side of the line.
You see writers like Junot Diaz or Gary Schteyngart or Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, calling on these tropes in their fiction and pulling in references and ideas from science fiction or speculative fiction that they've read and playing with the genre.
IND: Did your staff enjoy putting together this issue?
DT: We had a whole lot of fun with it. It was surprising how quickly and positively most of the writers responded to the idea. We found often that we ask people to do a short memoir and suddenly they've sat down and wrote a story. Junot Diaz sat down and wrote a story that he now says he's going to turn into a novel, so that triggered something for him.
This story was provided by InnovationNewsDaily, a sister site to TechNewsDaily. You can follow InnovationNewsDaily staff writer Francie Diep on Twitter @franciediep. Follow InnovationNewsDaily on Twitter @News_Innovation, or on Facebook.
