Jayme Lynn Blaschke is a freelance interviewer, which earns him points for courage under fire: interviewing is not really very easy, and writers and editors are sometimes among the most difficult of subjects. Voices of Vision is a collection of Blaschke’s interviews with editors, writers, and, as he calls them, “comic book creators” in science fiction and fantasy. The result is a look at a group of artists (and yes, that includes the editors, most of whom are writers themselves and who bring that sensibility to their work as editors) as varied as the twin genres themselves.
I found the interviews with the editors — Gardner Dozois, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Stanley Schimdt, Gordon Van Gelder, and Scott Edelman — the most exciting for reasons that I can’t quite explain — call it the editor in my own makeup, or maybe it’s just my conviction that these are the people who are molding the literature: the stories they select for publication are the ones that influence the next round of stories, because for all intents and purposes, these stories are what other writers are looking at and reacting to.
The writers, categorized as “unique voices” (Robin Hobb/Megan Lindholm, Patricia Anthony, Charles de Lint, and Elizabeth Moon) and “masters” (Samuel R. Delaney, Gene Wolfe, Harlan Ellison, and Jack Williamson) are indeed a varied lot, with responses as individual as their writing. The comic book creators (Elliot S! Maggin, Frank Cho and Scott Kurtz, Brad Meltzer, and, of course, Neil Gaiman) reinforce the idea that the literature of ideas is also a literature of new forms and new media.
What is most engaging about this book is that it is a glimpse at the belly of the beast, so to speak — science fiction and fantasy as a business, a discipline, a means of livelihood, and a community. Writers are not the only ones fascinated by how other writers work, and I think anyone who reads science fiction or fantasy (or both) is interested in how and why editors make the decisions they do. Blaschke is an engaging interviewer and has obviously done his homework on each subject — the questions are specific, pertinent, and invite elaboration, and each interview begins with a short introduction detailing the circumstances (including the information that those with Gardner Dozois and Gordon Van Gelder were first published in Green Man Review.)
Everyone will have favorites in this collection, just as everyone has favorite writers and private heroes. (The interview with Harlan Ellison is priceless, and fits Ellison’s persona so well one is almost convinced that Blaschke made it up.) For anyone interested in the twin genres of science fiction and fantasy, this is a treat.
(University of Nebraska Press, 2005)
