Put to the question...
... by miss_soap
1. What do you get out of writing?
I'm bound to say 'Ask me again when I'm getting paid for it' (that would be the optimism for which I am famous), but a less flip answer is 'An awful lot'. For instance, there have been two things this weekend that had me bouncing up and down in my chair with Sheer Joy of Manic Invention. (The MechaZazz thing over on Matthiaseseses LJ and a whole wedge of plot for a project I've been thinking about for a while ran up and hit me on the nose) If you've not found yourself standing there with a coming-up-hard grin going 'This is going to be so great' about some project, scheme or object that you're bringing to life, then, um, you're missing out and I suggest you give it a crack. Obviously the Manic Inventions need to be tied together with a plot, and that requires relatively believable characters doing internally-consistent things, otherwise you've just got a technical manual for some stuff you made up. (Which will sell, admittedly. 'Flight of the old dog' for instance.) That presents a different set of interesting challenges - it's Just Brilliant when ones characters become real enough to charge off in an unplanned direction. At that point the story's become self-fuelling and all one can do is frantically scribble it down. Then there's that whole social aspect about telling good stories, which is a lot odd if you were a shy black-clad bedroom loner. But then I warrant you know a lot of that already and it would really be pretty damn fine if you found the time to finish your thing off one day.
And this AM I was in receipt of my first proper rejection. An email from those nice Interzone people, so I can't set fire to the thing or practice any of the other sorts of rejectomancy that I'm given to understand go on. The short answer is that they were right to bounce it. There's the germ of an interesting idea in the story, it just wants rewriting in a couple of years time. I still don't know how I feel about it, mind.
In general, the sort of people who make up imaginary things and regularly attempt to tell random strangers about them are locked away for the safety of society and then prodded with sticks by people in white coats. So while I can get away with it, I'm good.
2. Gibson or Banks? Show your work.
Banksie, obviously.
(Show my work? Oh God...)
Right. The Crow Road. The whole thing's just startlingly good, but that's the first book (outside of Arthur Ransome) to make me think that learning Morse code would be a good idea. That, 'The Bridge' and 'Espedair Street' are remarkable exercises in wrenching happy endings from the most unlikely circumstances. And the language. Will Self seems to have the skill of pulling splendid words out of his arse like some disturbing magician with an odd hiding place for flags of the world, but when Banksie starts on in random dialect X (Say a third of 'The Bridge' or most of 'Feersum Endjinn') It Just Works.
Meanwhile, there's the Iain M. set. Sharrow and Diziet Sma for a kick-off. Mile-long spaceships crashing into each other, inter-Ship usenet, the whole 'escape from the docking bay' scene, FrintArms HandCannons... If all of those aren't repeated attacks of the Manic Invention I mentioned previously, then I'll eat my hat. (Preferably one of the smaller and less nice ones) I'm not generally a fan of space opera, but an on-form Banksie just makes a chap go 'Ah, fuck it' and go along for the mad rollercoaster ride.
As for Gibson... Well, he's going to be damned with faint praise. As a very early twentysomething larval hacker, I adored the Sprawl Trilogy. It was a lot what I wanted the future to be like, back in those days before we knew what the Internet would turn into... And in my case well before I had any idea what TCP/IP was and how many times it was going to turn my life on its head.
But.
Like Bladerunner, it's a good place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there. Not if you weren't insanely rich, or crim available for hire by the insanely rich.
3. What's the worst thing about current British televisual programming?
Where to start? Property television disgusts me, but I'm not entirely sure why. I could advance theories, but I'm not entirely comfortable with any of them. People have adopted the speech-patterns of spivs and salespeople when talking about houses, just like they did concerning cars when Quentin Willson was on the telly regularly. The wholesale commoditisation of the Warholian fifteen minutes is a grim, yet unsurprising cavalcade of the lumpenproletariat diving for the focus of the camera like sheep for the trough.
Mind, it's always been horrible. Recent documentaries about the history of light entertainment were reminders of the sort of rot one used to put up with. What could drive a youth to underage drinking faster than the prospect of 'Seaside Special presented by Little and Large'?
Thankfully, we have BBC3/4. There you can find the Avengers, Ballard retrospectives, programmes about Delia Derbyshire and the Radiophonic Workshop, the history of UK rocketry and (soon) a Wyndham play. (Random Quest. Previously filmed as 'Quest for love' and starring Tom Bell & Joan Collins.) If that's not JHR-TV, I'm not sure what is.
4. If you could go back and change one thing in your past, would you? If so, what would it be?
I wouldn't. There are a set of things that I should probably have done differently, and indeed a set of events that I would rather hadn't happened, but I don't think I could have got to be me here now writing this without all of it going on in the order that it did. It would be very nice to have a BSD-licensed Virtual Universe to poke around with scenarios - What would have happened if I had take Louise up on her original offer? Or if Steve & Withy hadn't gone up the Frog Mill that night? It's probably best not to speculate along those lines, because one could end up like Ashton Kutcher, and that would be a terrible fate.
5. Tell the world one surprising thing about you.
Here I draw a complete blank. I think the world gave up being surprised by anything I do or say quite a while ago. I've bored everyone rigid with tales of my grandfathers, or the whole German spy story. Anyway, those aren't about me. Um... I think I sound like an idiot when I hear a recording of my voice? I used to be (still am to an extent) desperately shy, and the drunken pisshead Hirez character was a front that took on a life of its own? (As such fronts are wont to do)