Excerpts from Upcoming Interviews

Just a few excerpts from upcoming interviews I've done with J.M. McDermott, Kage Baker, and China Mieville. I'll post links to the full interviews when they're up. (The WT one will be print-only.)JeffJ.M. McDermott, Amazon book blogI wanted to take epic fantasy somewhere it has never been. I called it "anti-epic" fantasy at the time. I don't really know what to call it. Certainly, if you are looking for a book like anything Wizards of the Coast has done before with their media tie-ins, you will not find it in my little book. Fantasy is not a genre that traditionally values experimentation. Usually, fantasy--especially epic fantasy--is where readers want good to conquer evil and true love to be won and all that. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a little mental comfort food now and then, but I hungered to read the kind of fantasies that take these particular tools and tropes and attempt to make an art form out of them.Kage Baker, Clarkesworld"I never start out to be funny, it just happens... sometimes the most horrific things are also ludicrously funny. My inclination is generally to write serious stuff, but life is absurd, and the more honestly I try to write about the world, the less its essential ridiculousness can be gotten around. Take--at random--the death of Rasputin. Read about his murderers nervously feeding him poisoned petits-fours, and poisoned vodka, and watching in disbelief as he just keeps shoveling it in and demanding their guitarist play his favorite songs. And when they finally can't stand it any more and unleash this horrifying catalogue of assaults on him--shooting him, beating him with chains, throwing him into the damn frozen river--and he's still trying to climb out, right up to the moment he freezes to death--you're wondering, what must they have been thinking? "Christ, can't we get anything right?"China Mieville, Weird Tales (85th anniversary issue)I've been thinking about this a lot recently. I'm teaching a course in Weird Fiction at the University of Warwick, so this has come up a lot. Obviously it's kind of impossible to come to anything like a final answer, so I approach this in a Beckettian way--try to define/understand it, fail, try again, fail again, fail better...I think the whole "sense of cosmic awe" thing that we hear a lot about in the Weird tradition is to do with the sense of the numinous, whether in a horrific iteration (or, more occasionally, a kind of joyous one), as being completely embedded in the everyday, rather than an intrusion. To that extent the Weird to me is about the sense that reality is always Weird.I've been thinking about the traditional notion of the "sublime," which was always (by Kant, Schopenhauer, et al) distinguished from the "Beautiful," as containing a kind of horror at the immeasurable scale of it. I think what the Weird can do is question the arbitrary distinction between the Beautiful and the Sublime, and operate as a kind of Sublime Backwash, so that the numinous incomparable awesome slips back from "mountains" and "forests," into the everyday. So...the Weird as radicalised quotidian Sublime.