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The K. Leslie Steiner Interview This interviewwasfirstproposed in 1992 and carried out entirely in writing in 1993, for an issue o/The Review of Contemporary Fiction—where a much shorter and much different version indeed will appear. This is its first full publication. K. Leslie Steiner: Your book Silent Interviews, due out shortly from Wesleyan UniversityPress, collects a shy dozen, major, meatyinterviews, that have appeared in publications as diverse as Diacritics and the Comics Journal. But, looking through my Delany files, I find a dozen more: still other interviews from both Virginia's Callaloo and Montreal's Science Fiction Studies, as well as Massachusetts's Contact, Washington's Lambda Book Report, and local newspapers from Lawrence, Kansas, to Orono, Maine: vis-a-vis most of us, even most writers, you're a widelyinterviewed man. Recently, however, you've discouraged personal interviews. You've urged those who would interview you to write their questions and send them to you; and you respond in writing—often very generously. Silent Interviews is restricted to such written interviews.And our own interview here is another through the mails—so far, five letters from me to you, twelve from you to me, and two brief phone calls—but no face-to-face contact. What's the reason for this? Is it to maintain privacy, control of what goes into print—or what? SAMUEL R. DELANY: The answer requires a counterquestion: What's the purpose of an interview in the first place? If the interviewee is some sort of criminal and the idea is to spring the embarrassing and unsuspected question—"What was in that maroon attache case you were seen passing to the security guard outside the building the night ofJuly i6th?"—so that you can report the stutter, the confusion, the embarrassment that signals guilt, complicity,and malfeasance , perhaps then the live interview has a place. 3 tJf 9 2 70 Part II But if the interviewis investigativein a deeper sense, and the purpose is to find out what the interviewee actually thinks about matters, the written interview is more concise and efficient. In the live interview,to questions of any complexity my answer will be lots of hemming, hawing, and sentences less than half completed while I think again—unless the topic is one I've written about within the last months; or one I've been asked about many times already; or one that's formed the subject of a class or lecture I've given recently. I can only answer a question with any ease or eloquence—or even articulateness— if I've had a chance to rehearse. Thus, precisely as the question is new and interesting, the live answer will be a botch. KLS: What kinds of questions do you like, then, in an interview? SRD: I've done a/az'ramount of thinking in the pastfiftyyears about the problem of representation, the relationship between art and politics, or the place of theory in writerly explorations. All are areas I'm comfortable , if not happy, to explore with an interviewer. Of course some questions are more likely (more likely than questions of representation, politics, and theory) to come to an interviewer's mind when she or he isaddressing me, as a writer of science fiction stories and sword-and-sorcery tales—questions I abandoned long ago, because their terms were invalid and the problems they were meant to solve could be handled far better by devoting thought to wholly different matters— often a complex of different matters. Such questions include: "What makes a good plot?" "What's your definition of SF?" "Where do you get your ideas?" Well, when an interviewer asks me such questions, I have to reconstruct why I don't believe there is such a thing as plot for the writer in the usual sense; or why SF belongs to a category of object, as do all written genres, for which it is impossible to find necessary and sufficient conditions (that is, it belongs to a category of object that resists definition in the rigorous sense of the word); or that ideas are notthings but— even the simplest of them—complex processes, and as such don't "come from" any "place," but are rather process-responses to any number of complex situations. With such questions, many of the ideas I'm dealing with are counterintuitive . And counterintuitive ideas can't be explained quicklyto someone who doesn't have a firm handle on them already. Nor can you...

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