This week the Coode Street Podcast, or part of it, is on the move! With Readercon 24 in full swing, Gary has travelled to Burlington, Massachusetts and has corralled award-winning author of Little Big and the Aegypt sequence, John Crowley, and long-time friend of the podcast Peter Straub to take part in a fascinating discussion of genre and other things. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast!
00:00 Introduction (flawed)
02:00 Discussion of reading and being influenced by early science fiction from the ’50s and ’60s, and the path from there to reading literature.
12:40 On how genre works and what makes the SF ideational space function. Mention of Bob Shaw’s classic “Light of Other Days”.
19:00 Peter discusses writing about fear, reading Ballard, and other influences.
30:00 On reading work as science fiction, including mention of John’s novel The Translator.
35:00 On how writing SF/F is accepted to day in a way that it was not before.
40:00 Peter discusses his novel In the Night Room.
43:00 Story McGuffins and the death of the author.
50:00 Sequels, Lin Carter, book signings.
58:00 A brief discussion of what’s next from Peter and John.
As discussed in the podcast, you can order the 25th Anniversary Edition of Little Big, or just check it out.
What a great conversation!
One thing that doesn’t come up nearly often enough in discussions of Little, Big is that it is deliberately a confluence of three genera. Everyone discusses it as a fantasy, but it is also very much a generational saga novel, and it is to a not-insignificant degree a science fiction novel. Smokey Barnable’s first visit to Edgewood is sometime around the date of the composition of the novel–thus, mid-to-late-1970s–and everything after that, including all of Auberon Barnable’s story–is set in the “future”, which is rapidly slouching towards ecocatastrophe and other sf dysfunctions.