Many of your characters seek for answers and learn. Is this very characteristic of you?

Yes, at least when I'm in one of my higher-functioning modes – but then, that's probably true for everyone. If there's any significant difference for me and my characters – and of course, this isn't unique to me or them – it's that the "learning" is often a matter of re-defining the question, even to the point of saying that the answers don't even matter, one way or another. This isn't a nihilistic stance so much as one of (to use language that makes me a little uncomfortable) spiritual development; that is, we dismiss one question as unimportant, but only in relation to another question that we never even thought of before. But this is one of the basic mechanisms of all fiction, not just mine.

How much of yourself do you put into the people - Axxter in FAREWELL HORIZONTAL seemed to me like a partial self-portrait?

A lot of my characters are self-portraits, not in terms of autobiography, but a sort of auto-psychology. They think or feel as I would, if I were in the same conditions that they are. Or alternately, the conditions that they're in are analogues of my own experiences, rendered in fictional metaphors that can vary from fairly realistic to absolutely fantastic. Axxter in FAREWELL HORIZONTAL is a metaphoric cousin of both Limmit in DR. ADDER and Legger in DEATH ARMS – these are people who come from a dead place, looking for something livelier; that's a classic adolescent motion, and they're adolescent versions of me (or everyone). Whereas McNihil (whose name could certainly translate to "from nothing" or "born of nothing") has a different relationship to that dead territory; to some degree, he has internalized it or even made a kind of peace with it, though he still loathes it and even sees it more sharply than those other, younger-seeming characters do. So he's something of an adult version of that same character, who is again a self-portrait to some degree. And in fact, McNihil's perception of the world surrounding him as being essentially cheesy and false, and another, illusory world as being somehow more real, is almost 100% my own perception.

Your science fiction rarely leaves the ground, so to speak. No space fiction, no sci-fi; real characters in unconventional settings, often the near future earth mirroring our today, our reality, our concerns. What kind of a relationship do you have with the genre today, and what's the appeal to you?

A great deal of science fiction, and nearly all of mine, isn't about what people often think it is, any more than, say, Shakespeare's history plays are actually about British history. Even taking into account the playwright's propagandistic intent (which was all about then-current affairs), the Scotland of MACBETH has very little resemblance to any real Scotland that ever existed. Similarly, most of the "future" in science fiction, and certainly all of the "future" in my writing, has nothing to do with what may or may not happen in any future that's likely or even remotely going to come about. The science fiction "future" – and the "future" in my books – is strictly metaphorical, a landscape where our characters can go about their business, all of which is, as you've correctly perceived, a mirror of present-day life.

As to my relationship to the science fiction genre today – that's hard for me to figure out. At one time, I was very serious about not writing any more science fiction, because I thought I had found another genre – horror fiction, basically – where I could write things that came closer to what I wanted to say. And certainly, the horror genre did that for me, at least for a while. But then I saw another way – or more correctly, I dimly perceived something which may or may not be gradually becoming clearer – where I could combine elements from both those fields into something that for me, at least, is very evocative. That is, I don't think I could have written a science fiction novel like NOIR without first having written the horror novels that I've done.

Do you enjoy the space, the freedom, it gives you?

I don't know if there's any more "space" or "freedom" to science fiction than there is to any other form of writing. And in some ways, a science fiction or fantasy writer has to work hard to create as much of a sense of freedom as there are in other forms. I'm theorizing here – it's not something I've completely worked out yet – but this might be because the sense of freedom comes from breaking through barriers, rather than from an absence of barriers to break through. A lot of things can happen in science fiction – you can make up whatever wild shit you want to – but just because they're possible, that doesn't necessarily mean that they evoke that sense of breaking barriers. There's a sense of time dilating and even stopping in the last scene of O'Neill's LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, to use a famous example, that no amount of hardware-based "time travel," as you get in science fiction novels, could ever hope to match.

Are there any negative sides to being a 'genre' writer?

Not really, once you come to the realization that all writing is genre writing. Even so-called mainstream or "serious" writing is just another genre, with its own formats and tropes and expectations and pitfalls.

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