DN: And you put forth Charles L. McNichol’s Crazy Weather as a relatively successful example of doing this well.
UKL: I did and I was taking a deliberate risk there. I know how the Indians feel about the whites speaking for them and they are absolutely justified in every respect. And yet I picked this book which is a white man writing in the voice of a person who is not an Indian, but a boy who was brought up by the Mojave. I have to assume that to some extent McNichol was. He couldn’t have known it that well otherwise. He just couldn’t have talked from inside that way. And since the book has an introduction by an Indian grandmother, totally approving, I felt like he did it right. He did it carefully, without co-opting. The sense that you are in touch with something really different—completely human and extremely understandable emotionally—but really different. That’s one of the great things novels do.
DN: One of the sections of Words Are My Matter contains your introductions to a variety of different books and also notes on different writers. We learn some interesting facts about you as we read them, for instance, that you and Philip K. Dick went to the same high school at the same time but never knew each other and that you refused your Nebula Award in the 1970s as a protest against the Science Fiction Writers of America revoking Stanislaw Lem’s honorary membership because of Cold War politics. And that the award was then given to Isaac Asimov, a cold warrior.
UKL: Served me right for being self-righteous, I guess.
DN: Among all the writers you engage with in this section, I was hoping we could talk about José Saramago and his importance to you in particular. In this book we get notes about him as a writer and also several book reviews and you say that he is the only novelist of your generation whom you still learn from. Tell us a little about what makes Saramago of such ongoing importance to you.
UKL: It all began with the poet Naomi Replansky, who is now ninety-nine and lives in New York, whom I got to know as a pen pal. Naomi was reading one of Saramago’s novels, Blindness, and told me, “This is great, you’ve got to read this.” So I got a copy, because I obey Naomi, and it scared me to death. I just couldn’t read it. It was so frightening and it was extremely difficult to read because there is no paragraphing and very little punctuation. It is made almost as if to deliberately slow you down. I backed off but I could feel there was something here. So I went and got some more Saramago and put myself through a course on his work. This is all within the last ten or fifteen years, very late in my life. He is not very far ahead of me. He was maybe ten years older than me. He started writing novels very late in his life and he was still writing novels in his seventies and eighties. That’s not only impressive but good news to me. You don’t have to stop. So I invested a lot in Saramago and it paid off for me. He is not an easy writer, partly because of his idiosyncratic punctuation and paragraphing. You just have to allow him that. I still don’t quite understand why he does it but I have to figure that any artist that good knows why he did it. He was very far left, a Marxist, not a devout Marxist, a socialist, always against the dictatorship in his home country, Portugal, and always against the heavy hand of the Catholic Church there. A man of extreme moral sensitivity, and terrific sympathy for all kinds of underdogs, including women and dogs. He won my heart is what happened. Boy, the Nobel committee made a good choice that time—otherwise I never would have heard of him. Most of us wouldn’t have. Being Portuguese is damnation as a writer. It takes a lot to get you out of writing in a “minor” language. Because he was always translated into Spanish, immediately, I think, he might slowly have come to notice. But I’m happy they Nobel-ed him.
DN: We’ve talked before about your book reviews. I think they are particularly interesting to read for writers and aspiring writers, as they become lessons in different areas of craft. I think your reviews of David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, China Miéville’s Embassytown, and Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible are particularly memorable in this regard. You definitely don’t pull your punches in your reviews but one thing I noticed that particularly gets your goat is when writers who are not from the world of science fiction and fantasy do a poor job with regard to acknowledging or understanding the tropes of the genre. I think of your review of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea as two recent examples that seemed to exasperate you.
UKL: I didn’t actually review The Road. I just took a crack at it while reviewing the book by Chang Rae Lee.
DN: What are some of the common pitfalls or particular annoyances you have with writers who try their hand at sci-fi or fantasy from outside the field?
UKL: They haven’t read any science fiction. They have no idea really what it can do or what it’s about. What tends to happen is that they laboriously reinvent the wheel. They get an idea, which is a commonplace idea in science fiction, one that has been worked over a thousand times, worked over with all kinds of literary variations, but because science fiction was not taught as literature they don’t know that. They take this old well-worn idea and bring it forth, declaring, “Look! Look at this wonderful idea I had!”
DN: You had a reverse scenario with reviewing Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood. Atwood is a writer you greatly admire, and she is considered one of the great living science fiction writers, but she herself insists she does not write science fiction. You felt like this insistence put some constraints on how you could approach your review of the book. Can you talk a little bit about this challenge for you, of assessing Atwood’s work in this review?
UKL: She excepts her work from being science fiction because she defines science fiction very narrowly. Science fiction to her is really more fantasy. It is things that can’t happen on Earth and things that are not happening on Earth. Sorry, Maggie, but that doesn’t define science fiction. A lot of it is very much about what is happening on Earth right now. It often extrapolates a little from that and really that’s what her science fiction does. She takes the way things are going, particularly politically, on Earth and extrapolates it into the future and goes, “Oh my god, it is going to be like this,” which is pretty dire. But that’s just an old science fiction technique. I don’t know why she doesn’t want her books to be called science fiction. But it’s not too hard to imagine some of the reasons. One of them is that her publishers absolutely didn’t want them to be called that, as that would make her a “genre writer.” And she wouldn’t sell as well. But Margaret Atwood is far too bright and complicated a person to be motivated by anything that crass. But it does make for a considerable discomfort sometimes in our ongoing conversation as writers who like each other. I just insist that when I write science fiction I know what it is and I know that I’m writing it. And I’m not going to have it called anything else. But that also is true when I’m not writing science fiction. I don’t want it called science fiction just because I’m a “science fiction writer.” These categories are very, very important to me personally. I’m always kind of on thin ice when trying to review Atwood. But it is always interesting.