Biography

That's the trouble with trying to counter clichés-the counterclichés cliché quicker than shit off a shovel, and with that comes domestication. Either you lose any subversive gloss at all-the hip-hop which once fought the power now sells us jeans and cheese-or, what's perhaps worse, a horrible zombie gloss of radicalism is retained while you shuffle into the corridors of establishment, rotting.

I see myself very much as a genre writer. I love the fantastic genres. I see what I'm doing as a development of them but very much a part of them. I never feel that I'm leaving them behind. I try and be as experimental and avant-garde and stretching as I can be but I don't see that as turning my back on the genre at all. Genre has always been able to encompass that.

I am often asked "Is my work science fiction or fantasy?" and my answer is usually "Yes."

Nothing strikes me as more Utopian than the reformist belief that with a bit of tinkering and some good faith, we can systematically improve the world. You have to ask how many decades of broken promises and failed schemes it will take to disprove that hope.

On role-playing games: If you take something like Cthulhu in Lovecraft, for example, it is completely incomprehensible and beyond all human categorization. But in the game Call of Cthulhu, you see Cthulhu's "strength," "dexterity," and so on, carefully expressed numerically. There's something superheroically banalifying about that approach to the fantastic. On one level it misses the point entirely, but I must admit it appeals to me in its application of some weirdly misplaced rigor onto the fantastic: it's a kind of exaggeratedly precise approach to secondary world creation.