"It's like drinking -- you start out saying 'Just a small one' - like a small interview, how much can that hurt? And you wind up blabbing away. It's basically a matter of will power. It's flattering to have people behaving as though you're saying something worth listening to." [IZ]|Home|Introduction|Bibliography|Quotes|Links|Updates| You should note that these quotes have been taken out of context, so things aren't always as simple as they may seem. See the bibliography section for information about how to obtain the complete interviews.
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[FE] - "Forced Exposure" (Summer 1989)
[IZ] - "Interzone" (Winter 1987)
[LO] - "Locus" (June 1996)
K. W. JETER ON:William Ashbless
"The little campus newspaper at Cal State was having a weekly poetry page with all these sensitive little poems appearing on it and Jim [Blaylock] and Tim [Powers] just hated the whole thing. So they came up with Ashbless as a satire on that. They'd write poems in his name and send them in. The editors of the little newspaper were completely taken in. They thought William Ashbless was a great poet who was a student on campus or something. They'd rave about these wonderful poems and print them up. But at that point Ashbless wrote in all kinds of styles. They'd write these real hokey haikus and things like that. Just slam off any sort of thing and send it in." [FE]cyberpunksee also International William Ashbless Society page.
"What's being labelled as cyberpunk is just the usual rediscovery of Alfred Bester that happens every two or three years in the sf field. Almost everything labelled as cyberpunk, just as with almost any supposedly new thing in sf, really resembles nothing so much as Alfred Bester's closet. Or his waste basket."[IZ]Philip K. Dick"It's the sf equivalent to the Sally Beauman Destiny shopping- and-fucking novel. Where everything that every character wears is described in terms of its brand name and where they bought it and how much it cost. I deeply distrust any novel where instead of people riding around in blipples and squibs, a great deal is made of them riding around in BMWs and Maseratis. When you start dropping brand names on the very first page, you're not dealing with genuine concerns - you're dealing with the concerns of consumerism and status. And not in any analytical way, but just as a cheap appeal to the reader's fantasies about owning all that neat stuff." [IZ]
"People make claims that cyberpunk is fast-paced because there are a lot of little details right after each other. Well, if that's what excites you, fine, but it puts me right to sleep. I underload on it, rather than overload." [IZ]
"Philip K. Dick was my favorite science fiction writer - favorite writer, period - an estimation I've never altered. So I was pretty blown away at this opportunity to have him take a look at something I had written [DR. ADDER]. Even better, it turned out he liked it, and called me up out of the blue, which was like getting a call from God. I went over and chatted with him. Once you have somebody you truly admire praise something of yours, you're screwed, condemned to continue that line of endeavor for the rest of your life." [LO]horror"A lot of the stuff we think of as being unique to Phil Dick is the bread and butter of thrillers and mystery novels. The paranoid element, the way the private eye or secret agent has to deconstruct an unreal world to find a real world. He has to break down lies and alibis and falsities, this sort of stuff, and then find something else underneath." [LO]
"..I'm rather pleased that some people have mentioned that my books have a low gore content for horror fiction. In the beginning that wasn't so intentional on my part, but now it's very intentional. My theory is that gory stuff isn't really that scary. It may evoke feelings of revulsion or disgust, so if you define horror books as producing that sort of slow, yeeuck get-it-away-from-me reaction, then that's horror. But it really doesn't generate much suspense, because you have to get into the nasty consequences real quick. Another drawback of luxuriating in gory detail is that every time you do it you have to interrupt the story. Out of sheer pragmatic desire to get the story ripping along as fast as possible I made myself a low gore horror writer." [FE]"phildickian""...if you're having a hard time deciding whether you're actually talking to your best friend or a giant bug from the Proxima system wearing a mask of your best friend - you're having a phildickian moment."science fiction"..That was always one of the big attractions about sf, before it ever had any academic attention given to it. It was a genuinely underground phenomenon in a way: a whole body of writing that you could read without having been given any preconceptions about it by your schoolteachers." [FE]short stories"One of the problems with science fiction is that it's really, typically, the field of clever children. The readers and writers tend to be clever children, but clever in a not really very interesting way. Clever in the way of the kid back in school who rigged up a system of strings and pulleys to turn his room light on and off from his bed. And though there are parts of me that that's appealing for, in some ways I feel a little leery of it." [FE]
"I don't even like to read short stories. The usual feeling I get after reading most short stories is, is that it? That was the whole thing? The most enthusiasm I ever got for short stories was reading James Joyce's "Dubliners." And if you're going to hold that as your standard of what short stories should be, you're really fucked." [FE]Victorian period"...I don't think it ever got used correctly. You find a lot of things that are vaguely Sherlock Holmesian, but real weird Victorian stuff never gets picked up on too much. You could be a real mad scientist back in Victorian days with nothing but a roomful of glassware and funny looking Volta batteries. Now you've got to have a trillion dollar grant from the Pentagon. In the Victorian age you were still able to do things in a closet that could revolutionize the world. In some ways it was the first, last and only really modern age." [FE]videotape"To me what's interesting about the video stuff is that it's expanding the realm of what's normal in terms of what goes on inside of people's heads. The ability to go into the past and run the past over and over again used to be the province of people who were crazy. Now we can live in the past on an optional basis. It's kind of neat thing -- like having an extra sense grafted onto your head." [FE]
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