Do you feel a sense of vindication since being nominated for a Nebula Award, as if you are finally being accepted by a mainstream audience?

Define "mainstream." The Nebulas are voted on by the active members of SWFA. Science fiction readers and writers are not a mainstream audience in my terms. I have been published in feminist, literary, science fiction, and lesbian/gay venues. All of them are niches. However, it could be argued that every publishing category is a niche created purely for marketing purposes. Even "Bestseller" categorization is a niche. Then you have to define "accepted." I have never been made to feel unwelcome in any writing gathering--with the startling exception of OutWrite, the national lesbian and gay writing conference, where I looked upon with amused condescension. Needless to say, *I* was not amused.

The word "vindication" is an interesting one, and not really relevant in this context. It implies I believed I had something to prove, that I feel the need to justify my work. I didn't and I don't. The only approval I need is my own: if I'm satisfied with the work, that's all that matters. Naturally, financial success is also important--but it is most definitely secondary. I believe firmly that if writers stick to their own guns, follow their own vision, they will have success in the end. It just sometimes takes a while for the readership to learn how to read a particular author's work. However, it *is* very pleasing to know that both the lesbian and gay community, and the speculative fiction community, now feel comfortable enough with my work to give it awards.

You have been praised for the technical authenticity of the science facts in your books, do you do your own research or were you formally trained in the sciences?

It depends what you mean by "formally trained." The UK education system differs from the US. The former specialize at a much earlier age. When I was thirteen, I had--essentially--to choose whether I preferred the arts or sciences. Being an awkward sort of person, I fought to study both. I have several years in such subjects as latin, physics, biology, chemistry, geography, maths, english, french etc. When I was fifteen, I was asked to specialize further. I started out studying biology, chemistry, physics, and general studies at 'A' (advanced) level, but after a year felt a bit bored, and decided to change the physics to maths, and to add english, and a special paper in creative writing. After a while, I dropped the maths (I had missed more than half the two year course and just was enough of a natural mathematician to catch up).

'A' levels, which the English generally study between the ages of sixteen and eighteen (I was a wee bit below the average age) are the equivalent of the first two years of an undergraduate major in this country. I don't have a degree--I started university twice and both times gave up in horror: thinking, except within narrowly prescribed areas, seemed to be actively discouraged--but when I was going through the immigration process, the educational equivalency evaluators decided I had the equivalent of an undergraduate degree, plus one or more years of graduate study.

So I suppose the answer to your question is: it depends upon which country you come from. For Slow River, yes, I did a great deal of research, though more on practical applications than theoretical: industrial equipment and so on. I love research. I get to read whatever I like for as long as I want and call it work. Lovely!

In an earlier interview, you stated that your emotional life filters into your writing, could you give an example of how this manifested itself in Slow River?

If I remember correctly, what I actually said was that most fiction is emotionally autobiographical; that is has to be, to some extent. For example, one doesn't have to be afraid of small spaces in order to imagine and describe someone who is claustrophic; one *does* need to have felt fear of something. You must have felt that adrenalin rush, the shaking in your bowels, to describe it believably. You need to have felt love to describe it--though I believe it can be hetero- or homo- (if it is sexual), and filial or maternal or platonic (if not). It's the experience of the emotion that's important, not the generator or focus of that emotion.

Novels are born out of our experiences. SLOW RIVER comes from the intersection of two different experiences, both of which changed my perceptions of myself and my place in the world. The first experience was when I was eighteen, the second almost ten years later. Let me quote here from a previous essay, "Layered Cities," which appeared in PARA*DOXA vol.2 no.1:

I was born in Leeds which grew to its present size during the textile revolution. It is now a bustling regional financial center. I was raised in a very conventional white middle-class Catholic family, and taught to always obey the rules--stay within the system and the system will protect you. I did not know that there was any other way to live. And then when I was eighteen I ran away from home to live with my girlfriend in another city. I stumbled from three square meals a day in a law-abiding atmosphere of wall-to-wall carpets and central heating into another world.

In this other city--whose economy was failing and whose drains were collapsing--I had no job and no money. No belongings. My lover and I were hanging with bikers and drug-dealers and prostitutes. I submerged myself in this new reality utterly. It was all very exciting. Very adult. Begging for food and selling speed for a living felt like a radical act: I was hardcore. Rules were for other people. I was above all that. I was different. This lasted for a few years, and then one day I woke up and realized that this was no longer a phase, or a game, or a diverting interlude; it was my life. This starving, cynical, uncomfortable and dangerous existence, in a hopeless and declining city, was all I had. So I struggled to climb out of the pit. And as I struggled, I looked around me and wondered why all the other people I knew in similar straits were not struggling, too. I began to wonder: what makes some people want to change, and others not? How come two people who seem to be faced with the same choices, with access to same resources (i.e. apparently none), make two different decisions? People, I understood suddenly, are not all the same.

In 1988 I came to the US for the first time to attend Clarion, a six week writing workshop at Michigan State University. As I flew over the cumulus clouds of the midwest, it occurred to me that there was not a single person on the continent who knew me. The sudden sense of being outside the world, of not being bound by ordinary rules or people's expectations, was exhilarating. I could land and be anyone I liked. No one would know any different. But then I realized that this hiatus in my ordinary life gave me the opportunity to play a much more dangerous and high stakes game. I could find out who I really was. Me. Not me-and-my-family, or me-and-my-education, or even me-and-my-accent, just *Me*. Without the usual identifying cultural markers, my fellow students and teachers would have no choice but to evaluate me on the basis of *now*. And by doing that, they would form a human mirror. For the first time, I would see my essential self, stripped bare.

These two realizations, together with the less-than-utopic city in which I had lived for nearly eleven years, formed the novelistic background for SLOW RIVER. The scientific background came from the fact that my partner, Kelley, was then working at an environmental engineering firm. These people were not tree huggers but engineers making serious money from the mistakes of past governments by remediating buried oil tanks, superfund sites, asbestos-filled installations and so on. She started bringing home magazines with intriguing titles such as _Garbage_ and _Pollution Engineering_. I was hooked. Soon I was pestering her to bring home catalogues of industrial machinery and equipment. I started dreaming, writing equations, asking the usual skiffy question: What If...?

We've read that you have participated in various writing workshops; how do you teach writing?

I don't believe you can teach anyone to write. It's more a case of helping someone develop their critical faculties so that they can go away and improve themselves on their own time. You can show them the basics of the craft; you can help them out with the professional aspects. The art has to come from within, and it can only be arrived at when all the craft has been learned thoroughly. Picasso didn't just sit down one day and start drawing weird pictures of women with their noses in the wrong place, he already knew everything there was to know about draftsmanship, about perspective and technique. That's the kind of thing a teacher can help with. The best way to do that is by a combination of lecture, assignment, and workshopping but in the end it comes down to one thing: learn how to see, both the world and your own work. I just wish that were as easy as it looks.

Bending the Landscape has been described as "the next step in the genre," what do you think is meant by this statement?

Good genre anthologies are rather rare. Most good ones manage to do one or perhaps two things well. I think the first volume, which is fantasy, of the projected three-volume series, Bending the Landscape, does several things well: it is a coherent whole; it has been selected with an eye toward both popular taste and excellent writing; it combines fantasy with one of the most enduring themes of science fiction, that of The Other--which in this case, of course, is the lesbian or gay man; it brings together writers from inside two different genres--speculative and lesbian and gay fiction.

BENDING THE LANDSCAPE: FANTASY is an attempt to strip the walls from the ghetto, to say to readers and practitioners of the above genres, "See, you don't need this kind of protection." It's my way of trying to show writers and editors and critics that they do not need to confine themselves to a box labelled "queer fiction" or "SF" or "literary fiction" or anything else for that matter. Both genres have some of the same blinkers. Skiffy fans scorn literature; queer fans scorn straight fiction. They have an Us-versus-Them mentality which is, frankly, laughable, because both queer and skiffy literature are already part of the history of most literary genres. Look at FRANKENSTEIN, at THE HANDMAID'S TALE, at any of the magic realists, at the work of Marge Piercy and Joanna Russ, at BELOVED, at MAURICE, at...but the list is endless.

What *is* science fiction? One of the leading critics of the genre has defined its main formal device as "an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment." To my mind, that's most fiction. And what is a lesbian (or gay) book? There is no such thing. Novels are not sexed at birth by some strange gowned and masked obstetrician at the publishing house: "Yup, this one has a womb (or two X-chromosomes, or no penis, or a sweet smile). Toss it on the women's pile. And make sure it doesn't rub up against any of those other female volumes. Could be a lesbian book."

There are no lesbian novels. There are only stories. Stories of our lives; our hopes and dreams; our loves and losses and daily victories over that callous and indifferent thing called the world. We write to tell our truth, so that someone ten miles away--a hundred, a thousand--can pick up a book and read it and think, "Oh, yes, I see. Of course. How true." That's what Bending the Landscape is for, to connect people, one to another: lesbian to straight, skiffy to mundane, me to you.

Has Slow River broadened your audience?

I'm not sure. For one thing, I really don't have a clear idea just who my audience is. I get letters from women and men, from genre and non-genre readers, from literary snobs and people who just like a rollercoaster ride. I don't think I have a very specialized constituency. However, if you mean "Has Slow River increased sales?" then the answer is yes.

Do you think that there is a danger of putting too much emphasis on gay/lesbian writing as a separate genre, specifically, will it become pigeon-holed even more than it already is?

I'm not sure it's possible to pigeon-hole queer literature more. I think genre is simply a tool of convenience for marketers. It will continue to be used until they have a better idea. Meanwhile, it's up to readers who want good fiction to ignore the boundaries, the conventions of cover tropes and logos and imprints, and read what looks good.

Science fiction writers are often very good at predicting the future; what is happening in the world today that leads you to believe that we will develop the "sexual economy" described in Slow River?

I believe both that (a) the sexual economy (which is a term employed by L. Timmel Duchamp to describe a very specific technique) of Slow River will never come to pass, and (b) it is already here. It is a question of perception. There are those who already see the world in such a way; that number is increasing. There are those who will never, ever be able to see a person first and their sexual orientation second--just as they cannot see beyond colour or religion or biological sex.

Considering the rapid growth of technology, do you think science fiction will become more popular?

No. The growth of technology now means that there are too many real wonders out there to play with. Science fiction's readership is aging. Forty years ago it was the literature of the young; now it's the choice of those who are in their late 30s and older. The genre is beginning to reflect that aging: novels are now much more emotionally complex and mature because they no longer have to be written for purely thrill-seeking teenagers. Of course, this means that younger readers aren't bothering with "real" SF anymore; they prefer reading novels and stories spun off from their favourite television programmes--because it's TV that is now providing the galaxy-spanning, pure adventure, sensawunda stuff.

Should we be worried about this? No. It simply marks the coming of age of the genre; more to the point, it marks the boundary-crossing moment when there no longer is a need for a genre. SF is part of the mainstream, and the mainstream is part of SF. I see absolutely no reason to panic. I do, however, see a reason for the publishers to change their tactics and start using a little more discrimination.

In regards to the last question, what do you think is the fate of literature in general?

I think literature is fine: very healthy, with lots of people ready to fight tooth and nail to ensure its survival. As long as books provide something no other medium can, they will continue to exist. They may not look like the books we read now, of course--I'm sure the cyberbook and print-on-demand are just around the corner--but it will be a written medium nonetheless. I think the future looks very exciting indeed.