Interview with Stephen Chambers

Moviewise--if that is a word--Star Wars was probably my biggest influence.  I saw Return of the Jedi--so I have been told by my parents--in the theater when I was three years old, and when that big monster comes out in Jabba's palace toward the beginning of the film to eat Luke, I shrieked and got under my seat.  So George Lucas scarred me for life.  Star Wars really is a kind of James Campbell myth for people of my demographic: young adult--late teens or twenty-something--males.  That's exactly what it is intended to be, and it worked.  Whenever I would get sick as a kid, I would stay home and watch the Star Wars trilogy, as if it could help me get better.  Never thought of it in those terms before, but it's probably true.  I am part of a generation of latchkey-afterschool-daycare kids growing up with the television, so it's only natural, isn't it, that Obiwan and Yoda should be our mentors?

Q: What has the Internet meant for you as an author?

A: So far the internet hasn't meant a whole heck of a lot, honestly.  I was never as good with computers as a lot of the people I hung around with, because I didn't really care about learning how to program.  "Can I write on it?" and "Can I play games on it?" were about as far as I usually got with computers.  Though, that's beginning to change.  I have made a point of getting a website, because I am told that authors should have a website, and at the same time, I am trying to make this stupid website work with about as much success as somehow trying to juggle a plate of jello: maybe it is possible, but it's darned difficult, and there doesn't seem to be much point to it.  That's not to say there isn't much point to the internet; instead, it is to imply that I am very inept at using said internet, thus far--and I am frustrated with web design.  I think it's only in the past few years that the internet has really started to be used for anything other than pornography anyway--and that is still its primary function for most people online.  Though, that's changing too.

When I was in high school I remember having a conversation with people about the internet, etc., and somebody asked "Have any of you ever bought anything on it?"  None of us had, nor did we know anyone who had.  Today, every other upper-middle class household is using Amazon.com or Ebay.  So it is obviously changing, and it is obviously terribly crucial societally.  "Technology: does it bring us together or tear us apart?"  Etcetera.  All kinds of writers are using the internet for all kinds of great and ambitious things, and that movie--which people like to make fun of now, but which was a definite cultural phenomenon--"Blair Witch", owed its success almost wholly, I think, to the internet.  It's an extension of the media which I haven't quite figure out yet, because even though the internet is supposed to be bypassing all kinds of structures and is supposed to make conventional book publishing, and so on, obsolete--it hasn't. 

I haven't personally started down the e-publishing road, and that may well be the path things are going to take, but for the moment the internet seems to be behaving like most science fictional projections.  Science fiction had tourists in space decades ago, but did they spot the end of the cold war and the rapid desire for funds by a poverty-striken Russian space program as the impetus for the first space tourist?  And an American in a Russian shuttle, no less?  Of course not.  So, the internet is, for the most part, casually ignoring everything that it is supposed to be doing, and evolving at its own pace.  Undoubtedly, it will be even more important in the future, but for the time being, I am more concerned with catching that plate of plummeting proverbial jello.