19 de dezembro de 2013

Pat Cadigan: "My ambition was to be good enough to get into one of those anthologies. I still want to be that good" (entrevista)

Uma história do movimento cyberpunk que se preze jamais ficará completa sem o nome de Pat Cadigan. O seu conto Rock On integrou a célebre antologia Mirrorshades, editada em 1986 por Bruce Sterling, que reuniu alguns dos mais irreverentes autores de ficção científica dos anos 80 (como William Gibson, Greg Bear, James Patrick Kelly e o próprio Sterling) e que, juntamente com Neuromancer, constitui uma das pedras de toque do movimento cyberpunk na literatura. Synners (1991) e Fools (1992) estão entre as suas obras mais marcantes; e este ano viu a sua noveleta The Girl-Thing Who Went Out For Sushi vencer o Prémio Hugo na respectiva categoria. Numa entrevista a Stephen Fergus, do blogue Civilian Reader, Cadigan fala sobre a sua recente incursão no horror com o livreto Chalk, editado pela small press britânica This Is Horror, sobre a sua escrita e sobre o que a atraiu para a ficção de género. Alguns excertos:
Stephen Fergus / Civilian Reader: What inspired you to write this particular story? And where do you draw your inspiration from in general?
Pat Cadigan: Michael Wilson asked me if I’d be interested in doing a chapbook and I said yes. I’d never done a chapbook before and I’m always up for a new experience. I read the previous ones from This Is Horror and found them all satisfyingly variegated (and quite good). So I prayed to the Story Fairy (Dept. of Horror) and this is what I got.

I know how that must sound. My creative process is a black-box operation and I’ve been at this long enough (34 years professionally) to know what works best for me: tell brain to think, consider the elements involved – genre, length, my personal taste; allow the associations to marinate overnight in REM sleep; return to task the next day, try writing a paragraph, see what happens. The first paragraph written isn’t always the first paragraph of the story and it usually undergoes editing if not outright retro-fitting, depending on what I discover in the course of writing the story.

Paragraphs that don’t work end up in my fragment box for recycling.

SF/CR: How were you introduced to genre fiction?

PC: We met in the dark. We’d already been making out for some time before I said, “Say honey, what’s your name?”

I had a library card for longer than I can remember. My mother would take me to the library with her and find books to read to me. Eventually, I learned to read myself and discovered that all the cool stuff was in the science fiction section. In those days – when dinosaurs roamed the net, before the discovery of flame – the genre wasn’t as stratified as it is now. Everything was science fiction – Heinlein, Bradbury, Clarke, Tolkien, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, Richard Matheson, Jack Finney – anything with a fantastic element was science fiction. Judith Merrill used to edit a best-of-the-year anthology that was the same way – pure-quill hard SF by Mack Reynolds and Walter M. Miller, Jr., sat cheek-by-jowl with oddities from Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, and Tuli Kupferberg. My ambition was to be good enough to get into one of those anthologies. I still want to be that good.
A entrevista completa pode ser lida aqui.

Fonte: SF Signal

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