E: What do you think of "modern" horror, the splatterpunk tradition and the fact that the movies are getting gorier and gorier and sillier and sillier?

GM: That's a very broad question. I have done panels that have lasted a couple of hours on that.1

Certain aspects of it concern me, actually. Let me make it clear that I'm not in favour of any sort of censorship here; I am very anti-censorship. I'm about as extreme as you can get on the whole issue of free speech. But nonetheless, as a reader reading some of these things, I wonder what they say about American society and culture, and I wonder what this trend signifies, as the horror gets more and more explicit and as the focus shifts, as it has so often done, to make the monster the hero instead of the villain of an awful lot of horror films . . .

E: I remember the line in "The Skin Trade" where a character attributes a murder to "someone who's seen too many Halloween and Friday the 13th movies".

GM: Right. I have attended a few of those movies where not only what's on the screen is disturbing, but the behaviour of certain members of the audience is very scary.

E: What are you writing now? What can we look forward to seeing in the near future?

GM: Well, at the moment I'm not in the middle of anything major. I am continuing to work on my Wild Cards series, which is an ongoing thing. Right now I'm functioning primarily as an editor on that, although I wrote half of Book Seven (which will be out in August in the United States). That's a two-person mosaic, myself and John Miller, so it's essentially a collaborative novel of which half is mine.

I have turned in Book Eight and am working on editing Book Nine, but I don't have stories in that yet. I'm simply functioning as editor on that, and the series is continuing beyond that. Until January, of course, I was working on [the] Beauty and the Beast television show, but that has ended now, so I'm signed to do a low budget science fiction film (screen play for that), but I can't really talk about that too much. And I'm kicking 'round some new novel ideas and I'm sure when June comes (June traditionally is the month where the new television season kicks up in Hollywood) I may get offers to write or produce some new television show. I would have to consider those, but whether I would go back there I don't know. It would depend on what the show is, what the offer is, is it something that interests me? So, essentially I have a few months off right now.

E: One of my favourite of your books is Tuf Voyaging. Locus announced quite a while ago there was going to be a second book, Twice as Tuf. Were they lying?

GM: Well, they weren't lying. There may still be such a book, but it's not coming out any time soon. Essentially, I signed to do Twice as Tuf and very shortly after signing it I wound up working out in Hollywood, at first on The Twilight Zone and then on Beauty and the Beast, and those took up an awful lot of my time. And the deadline came and went and we extended it several times for Twice as Tuf and nothing ever . . . I never had the time to produce anything on it. So finally I came to an understanding with the publisher whereby I gave them essentially two of my paperback rights to two other books, Dying of the Light, my first novel which they've just re-issued, and paperback rights to one of my collections that has never been in paperback [Portraits of His Children - Ed.], so they will be doing an edition of that too, and those are in lieu of Twice as Tuf. Now, I would still like to write more about that character and I still think I will get back and do that book some day, but exactly when that day will come, I don't know.3

The demands of TV when I'm working on a show keep me quite busy, and between that and Wild Cards I really can't do a whole hell of a lot. And now that I do have a little time to consider taking on another project, I don't think the "Tuf" thing is the first thing I really feel like jumping into right now. I'd like to do another novel when I get the time; another non-series novel.

GM: Well, with Wild Cards I'm functioning more as an editor than as a collaborator, so that's slightly different. Every one of my collaborations was essentially different.

The one with Howard was the first collaboration. That was essentially: Howard and I had been corresponding for many years, we finally met at a convention in Kansas City, 1972, and there must have been something in the water or something because we decided "Hey, let's do a story together!" So, while everybody else was up at the Playboy Club in the convention hotel being served drinks by luscious bunnies, Howard and I were back in our hotel room with Howard's little portable typewriter, pecking away on sheets of yellow paper and, you know, he would write and I would sit behind him on the bed and then he would stop and I would write, and we didn't finish very much of it. We finished a small portion, but then he took it home and wrote some more, sent it to me and so forth.

Lisa and I, we were poles apart to begin with. She was in Texas, I was in Chicago when we started and later Dubuque, Iowa, and we mostly collaborated through the mails, each one of us writing a section, sending it to the other one who would re-write the section the previous one had written and then extend it a certain period beyond that. So it went back and forth to a point that I can no longer tell what Lisa wrote in that book and what I wrote. Occasionally a sentence will leap out that's a "Lisa" sentence, or one of my sentences, but I really can't tell.

The thing with George Gutthridge, that was a very old story. In fact it was one of the first science fiction stories I ever wrote, which had gotten a lot of rejection slips but I'd never been able to sell it. Years later George took it and re-wrote it. So, I did my writing on that story in the late 60's, and he did his writing on that story a decade later.

E: Nightflyers was made into a film a few years ago. What did you think of the film? It was quite different from your story.

GM: Well, I think it was about 75% faithful, but unfortunately the 25% that they changed had a kind of a ripple effect and made the 75% that wasn't changed not make as much sense as it might have. They made some changes that I approve of and liked and other changes that I don't understand and didn't like.

I think the movie had some good things in it - lovely art direction, wonderful special effects considering the budget which was minuscule (yes, they don't have the special effects of Star Wars, but for a three million dollar film, which is what it was, they did a very impressive job) and had some nice secondary performances - but overall I don't think it worked. Alas.

E: Do you have any other film projects likely to go ahead in the near future?

GM: I have constant interest in "Sandkings". It's always being optioned, and there has been some interest in Fevre Dream, and Phil is still occasionally stirring around and talking about The Armageddon Rag, but whether any of these things will actually come to pass I couldn't tell you.

E: Who has inspired you as a writer? Who are your favourite writers?

GM: There's an awful lot of writers that I like. I think the ones who actually had the most effect on me were probably the writers that I read when I was young. I tend to think that those effects, which you absorb on a subconscious level before you even dream of writing, are the lasting effects. I mean, I grew up reading Andre Norton, reading Heinlein juveniles, reading Eric Frank Russell (who I think is a marvellous author who is too sadly forgotten). Lovecraft: when I discovered Lovecraft I was enthralled by him, for reasons that I'm sure I could understand if I was still fifteen [laughs].

These days my favourite writers are a different list. I'm a big admirer of Jack Vance. I don't know that Vance has had . . . Vance has had a definite effect on Haviland Tuf, who began in the very first story, "A Beast for Norn", as my very conscious attempt to write a "Jack Vance" kind of story, and if you look at "A Beast for Norn", it's me trying very hard to do Vance. And there are still parts of Tuf that are very Vancian. But other than that, I don't think that Vance has had a profound effect on my writing. I read a lot outside the field these days. People like Larry McMurtry, William Goldman, Pat Conroy. That's a lengthy list. I could drop names here all day.

E: How did the Wild Cards series start? I've heard mythology about it.

GM: Well, it actually started as a role playing game. There's a group of writers in Albuquerque who do occasionally game together, and they dragooned me into some of their activities. So I played various games with them and they knew that I was an old comics fan from childhood, so one year for my birthday Vic Milan gave me a superhero role playing game called Superworld, which I became the Gamesmaster of. And at least half the people in our particular gaming group were published professional writers, so they created some truly wonderful characters, and as Gamesmaster I created more characters than anyone else. And we played this game incessantly for like a year and a half and put an awful lot of creativity and development into the characters. At which point I finally said, you know, there must be some way that we can actually make some money off this [laughs].

No, the idea occurred to me that it would make an excellent shared world anthology series after the model of Thieves World. So, we got people together, we talked about it, and maybe a half dozen to a dozen of the characters made the transition. Now, to make it clear, I don't believe in just writing up gaming adventures. I think that's a good way to get really bad fiction. I mean, games are fun, but they're not books. So, many of our characters, although they had their roots in the game, were substantively changed and adapted as they made the transition. Also, a lot of people who have been involved in Wild Cards were not members of the game. I mean, we started with the core of Albuquerque writers but I promptly contacted a lot of people like Roger Zelazny, Howard Waldrop, Pat Cadigan, you name it, who were not part of the gaming group but who I knew had some affection for the pulp heroes or comic book heroes, the whole concept of superpowers, and who I thought would be able to contribute some interesting stuff to the series.

E: To new writers in general, any advice?

GM: I think this is a tough time for someone new breaking in. I mean, the early 70's, when I broke in, was a much more favourable period.

The short fiction market is still wide open. I mean, Asimov's, Analog, F & SF are constantly looking for new people because you can't make enough money off them [the short fiction magazines], so people tend not to stay long. It's still the best place to establish a reputation, however. I think establishing a reputation in this age where there's so many writers . . . making your name something readers will remember and seek out is one of the most important things.

One of the smartest things I did in my career, which I did by accident - I certainly didn't plan it - was not write a novel for the first five or six years. Because then, when the novel came out, it wasn't just the novel by somebody nobody ever heard of, it was the long awaited first novel by George R. R. Martin, Hugo Winner! It got me a much larger advance, it got a certain amount of hype, it got reviewed everywhere, it got visibility. And the way it got that visibility, of course, was in the magazines: by having not just an occasional short story, but a lot of short stories [published] in those early years. I had months where I had three magazines come out, all with one of my stories on 'em: cover stories. So, those early short fiction sales to the magazines are still one of the best ways to do that.

In the long run, of course, you have to transit to novels if you want to make a living from being a full time writer professionally. And that's the part that's getting harder and harder to do, particularly if you're a writer of any seriousness and ambition. I mean, I see the Hollywood world that I deal with, and the book world that I come from, are growing more alike every year, and it's not Hollywood that's changing. The book publishers are becoming more and more oriented towards commercial fiction, towards the bottom line. Once, as long as the company was generally making a profit, they would carry a good author for quite a few years and quite a few books until he found his audience and established his reputation. Now if your first book doesn't make money, you're going to have a real hard time selling the second. I mean, that's just the present situation. A lot of people say it's actually a very good market to sell a first novel in. But if that first novel doesn't turn out to be David Eddings or Stephen Donaldson, it's a terrible market to sell your second novel in.

E: Having been involved in both The Twilight Zone and Wild Cards, do you think that "shared world" is becoming a serious trend, or do you think that it is just a phase we're going through?

GM: Well, I think there's an element of both to it. I don't think anthologies worked on television, which is one thing to remember. I mean, The Twilight Zone was a failure, not even as successful as the original show, which had been in some way a marginal show for five years, however acclaimed it was, (and it was a wonderful show which I watched religiously when I was a kid). Sometime in my speeches here [Danse Macabre] I think I'm going to talk about some of this a little more, but this won't appear till after that, so just to go over some of the same ground: I do think that . . . all forms of fiction, all forms of entertainment, are moving more and more towards series. I mean, we see people in our field looking at it with very narrow tunnel vision and saying "What's happening to science fiction? There's all these bloody series!" It's not just happening in science fiction, it's happening to every form of fiction. It's happening to television, where anthology shows can't succeed and people want series shows. It's happening to movies, where you have Rambo IV and Rocky IX. Anything that's successful now returns with a II at the end of it.