I had never picked up a copy of the Paris Review before I randomly came across a collection of their “The Art of Fiction” (and Nonfiction) interviews with writers a couple of years back. The first volume, which included lengthy interviews with writers like Hemingway and Eliot, blew me away. And at my book club’s annual holiday book swap, I ended up with a volume of interviews with women writers (Dorothy Parker, Katherine Anne Porter, Toni Morrison) that was so inspiring I vowed to read one book by each of them this year (although I haven’t actually gotten started on that yet).
The magazine, which also includes fiction, photography, essays, and poetry, is just as amazing as the books, and the interviews continue to be fascinating. I really need to just subscribe to this magazine, but instead I mooch it off a subscriber friend every month. This month’s “Art of Fiction” interview is with Ray Bradbury and is all the more interesting because the original interview took place in the 1970s, was never published, and then was resurrected and finished recently by his biographer, Sam Weller.
I haven’t read much Bradbury, other than my recent foray into Fahrenheit 451 and my middle-school experiences with Something Wicked This Way Comes (which I totally want to read again). And I rarely, if ever, read science fiction. But the more I read lately, the more I find myself saying that some book or another (like The Sparrow, or like The Time Traveler’s Wife) didn’t seem like science fiction to me—which basically means that it was well-written and I liked it, therefore it must be a departure from your typical sci-fi. The same thing happened last week when I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which seemed too good to be considered a mystery novel.
In any case, the interview with Bradbury addresses the idea of science fiction as being a second-class form of literature. It’s excerpted
here (gotta love that quote about the library), but the thing that intrigued me most was this (partial) answer to the first question, “Why do you write science fiction?”:
Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. … Imagine if sixty years ago, at the start of my writing career, I had thought to write a story about a woman who swallowed a pill and destroyed the Catholic Church, causing the advent of women’s liberation.In addition to the idea of science fiction as the “fiction of ideas” and “the art of the possible, never the impossible,” his example completely turned my conception of science fiction on its head. Because, damn, if he had written that story in the 1940s or 50s it would have seemed outlandish, and yet it was totally prescient. And because it didn’t involve aliens or time travel, I probably wouldn’t have considered it science fiction at all.
His answer especially resonated with me because I just read a fascinating
article in Time, of all places, on the 50th anniversary of the Pill. I’ve heard it called the most important modern invention, and I guess that’s debatable, although I personally agree with it. Regardless of where you’d rank it on the list, the social implications of something so seemingly simple are staggering. But I think Bradbury’s quote encompasses that whole idea as well as or better than the whole article.
Which is all just an extremely long-winded way of saying that I’m going to have to work harder to conquer my genre-fiction bias and be open to books that I might normally dismiss. As long as they’re well written, that is. Let’s not go too crazy.
