Interview with Stephen Chambers

I had been sending out short stories for awhile and getting rejection letters to "S. Michael Chambers"--a name I used because I thought it made me sound older--that said things like "Not bad, but not for us".  Some of these rejections even had little personalized notes from the editors, telling me that they were sorry they couldn't print what I was sending them.  At the time, I didn't quite realize how rare it is to get notes like that; I just thought of them as rejections.  And I was getting very frustrated with writing very quickly--I was ready to give it up and shoot for acting.  Yes, I would keep writing things, because I couldn't help it, but I was tired of sending them in and being told that they were not good enough.  Then, at the end of that summer, right before my junior year in high school, that changed.

My mom picked up a flier for a writer's conference at a Barnes and Noble, and I filled it out and sent it in.  It started at 8:00 am on a Saturday, and that same day I had been planning to roam the town bothering people with a video camera with a friend of mine.  Instead, I went to the conference.  It was in the basement of a bank, across the street from the Barnes and Noble where my mom got the flier. 

I loaded up on coffee, put the novel I had just written the summer before into a big binder and charged in.  I was about twenty years younger than the other thirty or so people at the conference.  The conference, it turns out, was a parade of speakers and then a one-on-one with either an agent or an editor.  The first speaker was the agent.  He had a nice British accent and was trying to get some audience participation.  I sat out the first bit as he asked people questions about plot in various recent movies, and the people around me continually answered wrong. 

Finally, when the audience had given up participating, deciding to wait out the remainder of his hour-long talk, I decided to join in.  It turned into a kind of dialogue between the agent and me with the rest of the audience listening irritably to this little kid who obviously had stumbled into the conference from the beanie baby convention across the street.  Beyond that, the rest of the conference is a gray blur in my memory, except for the one-on-one I had with this same agent, where I tried to offer him the novel I had brought with me.  He smiled politely and said "No thank you."  Instead, he gave me his card, I called him the next week, sent him the first fifty pages of the book, and shortly thereafter he agreed to work with me to get what I was writing into a publishable form.  A year and a half later, we sold two books to Tor.  Hope's End being the first.  

Q: How much science and how much fiction do you think there should be in SF?

A: First, there are several different kinds of science fiction.  People like to label them "hard" and "soft", which makes me think not of SF per se, but of unrelated, not-fit-for-print subjects.  That aside, I think the short answer here is: to each its own.  What bothers me, are people who read a good piece of science fiction and they say things like "Well, that wasn't science fiction, that must have been Kafkaesque literature"; because, obviously, science fiction is just rocket ships and robots.  It's the same philosophy as the people who label good comic books "graphic novels".  They aren't graphic novels, they are comics, and just because Maus won the Pulitzer and Sandman won the World Fantasy, doesn't make them any less comic books and any more graphic novels.  There is a lot of literary pompousness, that maybe just comes from me being around college-types at the moment, but I think is more reflective somehow of what's going on in the bigger picture of genres and national book reviews--or lack thereof--at the moment.