Interview: Kristine Kathryn Rusch

By Darrell Schweitzer

Tanith Lee is the author of “Our Lady in Scarlet” in the August 2009 issue of Realms of Fantasy. She is the author of The Birthgrave, the Flat Earth series, Dark Dance, Don’t Bite the Sun, Heart Beast, and others, more than eighty books in all, plus numerous short stories. Among her awards are two World Fantasy Awards for best short fiction (1983, 1984) plus eight more nominations; and a British Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1980 for Death’s Master plus five more nominations.

Q: So, would you tell the readers something about the background of this story, “Our Lady in Scarlet,” and how it came to be written?

Lee: In my late twenties something I can’t specifically recall, made me seek to learn more of one of the most terrible plagues, the Black Death of 1347. (I later wrote my third radio play from that interest/research: Death is King, broadcast by the BBC in 1979). Subsequently accounts of other outbreaks of this plague, particularly those in the 16th century, seem to turn up in my viewing and reading life, and from one of those I learned that the colour red was thought to be an amulet against infection. This bizarre notion stayed with me for years, and only finally resolved itself in my head, complete with a title, in 2008. The plot was all there for me however in that title, and the student hero with it. This story was written in just over a day.

Q: A curious notion, that red protects you from infection. It seems counter-intuitive, red being the color of blood. I can’t help but think of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” Did that occur to you too?

Lee: Yes, it did. However black is more associated with this type of plague (Black Death) – for various unpleasant reasons to do with the swellings and emissions of those afflicted. The aspect of red seems to be lifeblood, that is healthy blood. But red of course is also a power colour, sometimes connected to angels. Additionally, in the East, red may carry various positive connotations ( As in Feng Shui ).

Q: You’ve published almost as many novels as shorter pieces. What comes more naturally to you, short stories or novels?

Lee: Both. The only truly significant difference for me is that, with a novel, generally I can have a longer stay there. On the other hand I’ve written a couple of novels in under two weeks, and the occasional – very long or very complex, or very interrupted – short over as much as a month.

Q: Don’t you think that a short story requires a kind of compression that a novel does not? ARE there technical differences between the two, other than length? I encountered the claim once that if you take a short story and turn it into the first chapter of a novel, you have to (even if you alter nothing) effectively change the meaning of every last word, because the short story points toward closure at the end and the novel chapter has to open out into the book. Have you done much expansion of shorter work into novels?

Lee: You’re probably right about the differences between short and long fiction. But as I’ve said before, elsewhere, I never know, technically, what I’m doing, or not till I’ve finished it. This isn’t me being evasive or ‘coy’ – I really don’t. Unless, and this is rare, I really plan a structure beforehand in order to experience some off-kilter schematic. But even then the characters take over and much changes. Frankly too I’ve read some short stories that might easily be the first or even somewhere-in-the-middle chapters of a novel – Katherine Mansfield comes to mind – and some short stories that are miniature novels – for example Joseph Roth’s Legend of the Holy Drinker ( actually published as a novella). There are also examples I recall with Fritz Leiber. Not to mention the extraordinary Ted Hughes’s book, Birthday Letters, which to my mind is harrowing, grieving, melodious example of an auto/biography, whose chapters are told in genius poems.

As for myself – the first 3 chapters of my fantasy-historical-horror novel Elephantasm (1993) were originally a short story, complete with the ‘end’ they still have, (an execution). While my short fantasy story The Demoness (1970’s) was begun as a novel. Oh, and the unfinished Scarabae series, especially books 2 and 3, have several chapters that almost really are short stories, yet stay part of the novels. A short story recently published, Meanwhile: Scarabesque, is due to be part of the 4th Scarabae novel – Darker Ages – if ever anyone wants it, or I have space to write it anyway.

Q: Does the market these days let you do what you want? Are you able to write and sell the novels you want too?

Lee: Until fairly recently the ‘market’ did let me do just that. In the beginning I seldom even had to offer a synopsis or proposal, either. As I hardly ever work from a synopsis – I find they act like chains, besides anyway not often knowing where exactly the book will go until I am writing it – the earlier state was a happier one. But I did my best when a synopsis of some sort began always to be required, only adding a note to the effect that some things might change during production!

Now though most of the so-called big publishers are unwilling even to look at a proposal. They aren’t interested in seeing anything from me, not even those houses I’ve worked with for many years. Where any slight interest in my turning in a book exists, I find I must work inside certain defined formulae. And to me that’s one of the arch inspiration-stranglers. I have at this time no new book, adult or Y.A, either out or due to come out, let alone any contract to produce a book for any of the main companies. And besides that only a couple of things are scheduled to appear from small, if reputable and elegant houses.

I must add, that doesn’t stop me actually writing. Writing is one of the most important things in my life. I have, so far, a cupboard stocked with 3 completed never published novels – contemporary, horror, 2 short (original) story collections, and proposals for 4 books, 2 of them adult fantasies. I’m just now finishing another novel.

Which means I have, largely, been returned to the darker element of my 20’s, when The Birthgrave. The Storm Lord, Don’t Bite the Sun and Eva Fairdeath were stacked in a box in my bedroom, unwanted, rejected and indeed – in the case of some publishers – insulted. It was hard enough then. But I’m in my 60’s now. I don’t have time to wait.

Q: How does an established writer like yourself account for this lack of interest? It is true that book sales are reportedly down about 20% this year. Is it all just bottom-line calculations? It’s too easy for any of us to conclude that only junk sells, or the editors and publishers are stupid. We know a lot of them, and we know perfectly well they are not. So what do you think is going on here?

Lee: A ‘writer like me’ has always, intermittently, encountered exactly just this type of ‘lack of interest’. Luckily for me, once I’d finally gotten published, though it effected things occasionally, there were always more doors flying open on Welcome! Signs. But that, as they say, was then…

Yes, I can only conclude (without knowing any figures) that a lot of this is financial. I have had people say to me, ‘we would like to publish this, but though it would sell, it wouldn’t sell enough. And so They won’t let us buy it.’ And no, of course, most of us, (me included) know editors and actual publishers we like and respect, and who still publish some top rate stuff (thank God). But also there is a definite aggrandizement of ‘inferior’ material, that is then hyped and so becomes a best-seller. Or worse – material written (even by ghosts) by so-called celebrities (I exclude here true celebrities, e.g. justly popular actors, artists, surgeons, athletes etc: ) which are loved apparently by the (also) so-called masses. There’s nothing inherently wrong in that. People should be able to read what they like. Also it will cream in lots of money (presumably) for the houses that dish it out. Where it is wrong is where said houses will not also publish good writing for people who prefer to read that. Fortunately there are some authors of such estimable genuine genius, who justifiably have shot to the tops of trees and stay there – still published, still a feast for anyone who can buy or library-borrow a book. There is a lot of hope in that, at least for us readers. But for us writers who are just not that gold standard,

(and neither to the sub-standard either) we find ourselves caught in the middle, and then jettisoned.

I have had quietly phenomenal sales, now and then. And I have had mountains of mail in favour of my work (always a joy) and here and there queries asking me – or presumably my representatives – if I have died, since no books of mine are now being published. Publishing almost certainly will pull round in the end. Then there will be a demand for talent right across the spectrum. But for some of us, both old and young, it will be too late.

Q: What you are describing is the tyranny of the corporate Suits, who tell editors what they can buy on the basis of projected sales. I think what happened is that as soon as there got to be science fiction, fantasy, and horror bestsellers, these categories lost their innocence. It had previously been assumed that any category book would sell about as well as any other, probably on the basis of the cover, so it didn’t much matter what was actually in the books. This gave the editors considerable freedom, which they no longer have. Who could imagine an R.A. Lafferty book in mass-market paperback today? They used to be common enough. Now that the corporate owners know that SF/fantasy/horror bestsellers are possible, they want everything to be Dune or Stephen King. They divide their list up into bestsellers and failed bestsellers, and eliminate the latter. Would you agree?

Lee: What you say is probably true. It sounds clinically dry and heart-soulless enough it would fit the general feel of things as now they are. But I never really know what goes on inside the publishing machine. Only what it produces, or fails to produce.

Q: Do you think the small presses can take up some of the slack, particularly for the more individualistic stuff? I was remarking to you on how Tachyon Press publishes Peter Beagle and Brian Aldiss these days, because, apparently, the major New York publishers are no longer interested. My feeling is that the NY publishers are playing it too safe and losing a lot of their readers.

Lee: My own feeling is that salvation very likely lies with these small presses, many of whom are marvelous, intelligent, and eager to put good stuff into print. I draw a lot of comfort from their existence, especially for new young talent which otherwise might be trodden underfoot. Will brave small Davids become the (Benign) Goliaths of tomorrow? Mighty oaks etc:-

Q: If you had to, in order to make a living, would you consider reinventing yourself in another genre, such as crime/suspense?

Lee: I’ve already written contemporary novels (5), detective fiction, (one, so far) and Lesbian novels and collections under the unhidden by line: Tanith Lee writing as Esther Garber. Some of these were published by a small press in England, and got good reviews in such as Locus, and The Guardian in the UK. The royalties were pretty good too, before the publishers went bust. So I do ‘reinvent’ my stuff, at least genre-wise, anyway. I’ve written an historical novel too – French Revolution, published by Overlook years ago. I am a beast of many colours. But right now it makes no difference with publishers. I just enjoy doing it.

Q: Thank you, Tanith.

By Darrell Schweitzer

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is the author of “Flower Fairies” in the October 2009 issue of Realms of Fantasy. She is the author of sixty published books in various genres (including, of course, Science Fiction and Fantasy), some in collaboration with her husband, Dean Wesley Smith, and some with Kevin J. Anderson.

She won the Hugo for best novelette in 2001 for her story “Millennium Babies”, the Endeavor Award in 2003 for The Disappeared, and the Sidewise Award (for alternate history)for “Recovering Apollo 8″ in 2008.

She edited The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction between 1991 and 1997 and won one Hugo as Best Professional Editor in 1994. She co-edited Pulphouse magazine and co-published Pulphouse books with Smith and the two of them won a World Fantasy Award for that in 1989.

Q: Would you tell the readers what is the background of “Flower Fairies”? How did it come to be written?

Rusch: I dreamed the opening. That almost never happens any more, but this one did, and the story happened very fast after that.

Q: When your subconscious just heaves up an opening like that — i.e. in a dream — what then? How deliberate is the construction of a story for you?

Rusch: Not deliberate at all. I just followed the image where it took me. I generally do that. I get an opening and I continue to write.

Q: Now, you say you start with the image (that in this case came in a dream) and just follow it where it goes. I, as a writer, have some sense of what this process is like, but I am not sure that our readers do. Is this free-form association? Like dreaming on paper? How practiced (or deliberate) is the technique?

Rusch: Well, writing a story itself is a learned technique, but the hardest part of the technique is to then forget everything you learned and trust the process. If you think too hard about it, you’ll screw it up. So basically, I tell myself a story. In this case, I wanted to know why that little girl fairy was in a flower arrangement in a funeral home. As I kept answering the questions, more arose, until I had answers–and a story.

Q: Do you have time to write many stories between your numerous novels? Do you have to deliberately schedule short-story writing time?

Rusch: Sometimes I do have to schedule short-story writing time. I write stories between novels. I also write stories to deadline–which I find fun. I often write for anthologies to have the deadline and the challenge of writing about a particular topic. I feel that it stretches me.

Q: What sort of fiction would you prefer to be writing, all other things (like the money) being equal?

Rusch: I write what I feel like writing that day. I never write for money (not any more). I already write what I prefer to write. What I would prefer is to  hit the New York Times list with a novel or two, but that hasn’t happened  yet and is wildly out of my control.

Q: You’re a writer who has written in a broad range of genres, so you may have a good sense of what the market wants today. Do you have any sense that, as some people argue, fantasy is beginning to displace science fiction in the marketplace? I note that just this year, for the second time, a YA fantasy novel won a Hugo. Some of the hard-science types are beginning to circle the wagons. What is your opinion of all this?

Rusch: I just wrote a column on that in IROSF. It’s easier to point it out than it  is to reiterate. http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10569.

Q Your article on the Internet Review of SF raises a further question. Do you make a distinction between actual forms of writing — in the sense that an epic is not a ballad — and marketing categories? Is there actually a distinct form called science fiction and another one called fantasy, which exist regardless of how they are packaged?

Rusch: Hmmm. Not sure I entirely understand your question, which is probably an  answer in and of itself. But I’ll give it a whirl. I think all fiction–even mimetic fiction as John Gardner and the mainstreamers like to call it–is fantasy. After all, it’s made up. So it’s not real. Which makes it, by definition, fantasy.

The categories differ if you’re talking to professors or you’re talking to marketing. Professors also use the old-fashioned tragedy and comedy definitions–comedy not being something that’s funny, but something with a happy ending. So it can get confusing.

As for marketing categories, they’re always shifting too. I recently talked to the head of a fantasy book line and she told me that they can’t take any stories set in the country or rural areas. Nor do they take alternate world fantasy (what we used to call traditional/high fantasy). In other words, they only take fantasy set in cities in modern times, probably with a kick-ass heroine. To me, that’s a subset of fantasy. Call it urban fantasy or contemporary fantasy (the 1990s term), but it’s a subset. For this publisher, it’s their entire “fantasy” book line.

As you can tell, I’m not a big fan of categorizing fiction. I don’t write only in one category and I don’t read in one. I actually feel sad for folks who only read one genre. They’re missing so much good stuff! Of course, the other side of this is that I get overwhelmed whenever I go into a bookstore. So many books, so little time. I envy my sister, who recently retired. When asked how she’s spending her retirement, she answers, “I’m reading.” All day. Every day. If only.

Q: As to form, I am making a distinction between literary form and a marketing category. It seems to me that there are distinct forms. When Shakespeare was writing Hamlet he knew he was writing not just a verse play but a revenge tragedy (a genre form) which imposed certain requirements on him, particularly as to the development of the plot. When Virgil was writing the Aeneid he knew he was writing an epic, which observed specific conventions. A sonnet is a distinct form, in a very technical sense. 15 lines and it is not a sonnet. It may be a good poem, but it is not a sonnet. A detective story observes certain conventions. If there is no crime and no detection, then it is not a detective story. In each case the writer is conscious of the form before starting to write.

So, is there a form that can be called “science fiction,” possibly a subset  of fantasy, quite irrespective of marketing strategies? When you suggest that science fiction may come to an end soon, do you mean that the literary form itself has exhausted itself in the same sense that, say, the lost race novel has, or that the marketing strategy of putting a rocket ship on the cover and the words “science fiction” on the spine no longer sells books?

Rusch: I think science fiction will always be a literary form and is more viable  now than ever in that capacity. The mainstream market uses SF a lot, witness Cormac McCarthy and Audrey Niffenegger. Not to mention Jasper Fforde and others. Science fiction is everywhere, but the marketing category is in trouble, and I think we did it to ourselves, unfortunately.

Q: As for that editor who only wants fantasy set in urban settings with a kick-ass heroine, this seems awfully narrow-minded, don’t you think? Would this editor have rejected The Lord of the Rings? After all, it’s mostly rural in its settings and features a kick-ass heroine (Eowyn) only incidentally. This sounds like the very worst sort of bottom-line editing.

Rusch: Well, yes, and no. Right now, urban fantasy with kick-butt heroines is hot,  and that’s what this particular line is chasing. And yes, if they’d gotten The Lord of the Rings, they would have rejected it in a heartbeat. But fortunately, other publishers have a fuller-fledged fantasy line, and would still buy The Lord of the Rings. I think it has always been thus, and always will be. Some publishers will embrace narrow marketing structures (the easier for the sales force) and others will have a broader view.

Q: If all New York publishing becomes like this — prose television, chasing the latest trend — doesn’t this leave a huge opening for independent publishers like Small Beer, Night Shade, or Tachyon? Where does the genuinely innovative or even just sincere writer turn? You might have some insight on this, as you were deeply involved in independent publishing at one point through Pulphouse.

Rusch: I think the innovative writer must always look outside one particular genre and try to find the innovative publishing houses. Those houses aren’t always small, btw. I’m seeing a lot of creativity in some bigger houses on the mainstream level right now, a willingness to incorporate genre trends from all the genres, so long as the writing is good and the characterization stellar. YA in particular seems to embrace everything.

I often think specialty publishers point the way. What they do is prove  audience. Once an audience is established, the writer can sell the book to  the bigger presses. Websites will do that now as well and so, oddly enough, can self-publishing. It couldn’t in the past, but with the internet, people from all over the  world can find a self-published book. So access is changing, and that’s a  good thing, I think.

Q: So, tell me something about the beginnings of your career. How long have  you been writing?

Rusch: Oh, sadly, I’ve been writing since I was seven years old. When I turned  twelve, my wonderful brother gave me a subscription to Writer’s Digest. I’ve been paid for my writing since I was sixteen and started writing the high school news column for the local paper. I’m an early bloomer as a writer, selling my first major short story at 25 (I sold others to small presses in college) and my first novel at 29.

The upshot of all of that is that the field has known me for more than 20  years now, and everyone thinks I’m an old fart. I’m only a middle-aged fart, with at least another 30 years ahead of me. Bob Silverberg and I have discussed this, since he’s gone through the same thing, and he finds it as amusing and frustrating as I do.

I feel like a Monty Python character–”Not dead yet!” she writes, shaking her  pen at people. “Not dead yet!”

Q: If the category is in trouble because of what “we” did, what do you think  we did? Pursued short-term profits at the expense of long-term growth?

Rusch: A lot has changed in the past 10 years, Darrell. A lot has changed in the  world. Science fiction is everywhere–in commercials, in romance novels, in  movies (all the biggest movies are SF), in television. The Big Bang Theory makes SF references all the time and expects the audience to understand  them.

So why isn’t SF the marketing category selling well? Because the SF  community made SF a closed system. We made people think it’s hard. My professor sister, who gave me Flowers for Algernon and several other SF books because she liked them, was asked to teach an SF course at her college when her colleagues found out I was an SF writer. She called me in a panic, telling me she never read SF. It was too hard, too hard to understand, too boring. And yet, she had read a lot more SF than I had. She had just discovered it outside the category.

Her reaction is pretty typical. A lot of people think SF the genre category  is a tough read. We did that. By saying that no one can use the old tropes, that books must build on previously published things (out of print for 50 years!) and by using jargon instead of clear language.

Q: Sure Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is SF, but has much changed then? SF, at  least by approved writers, has always been able to sneak into the mainstream, as long as you don’t call it SF. Thus critics have go to great lengths to explain why Brave New World or A Clockwork Orange or Riddley Walker is not SF. This is a combination of snobbery and a marketing strategy, but do you think it still works? Would the same science fiction novel, published as mainstream, sell more copies than if it were published  in category? Do you think that would work with one of your books?

Rusch: Wow. Lots of questions here, Darrell, many of which I’ve covered in  columns, articles, and essays, including “Barbarian Confessions” in Asimov’s http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0612/thoughtexperiments.shtml, and more  recently in an internet review of science fiction column: http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10569. I’ve written about this a lot,  and would rather have people look at the entire arguments than distill them  too much in an interview.

So…could one of my SF books sell well in the mainstream? Now, yes. The  Retrieval Artist series has a lot of mainstream/mystery readers. It would have more, but it was marketed into SF ten years ago. I suspect some mystery editors would take a plunge with the series now.

And–my alternate history story, “G-Men,” published in Sideways in Crime, is  in the prestigious mainstreamy Best American Mystery Stories 2009. The mainstream/mystery/other marketing categories have accepted SF if it’s understandable and readable to people who weren’t raised in the genre.

Would McCarthy’s book sell to an SF audience? That’s a huh? question as far  as I’m concerned. Why would he want to? Let’s see–sell 1 million plus copies all over the world or 10,000 copies in the U.S. Which audience would anyone want?

Q: Or does “mainstream SF” have different requirements and actually constitute a different genre?

Rusch: No.

Q: Do you think it possible that in the near future Science Fiction will be subsumed into Fantasy, the way that, forty years or so ago, Fantasy was a small subset of the Science Fiction category? (This sure sounds like Gregory Benford’s worst nightmare, doesn’t it?)

Rusch: Possible. I doubt it though. I think the SF category will go the way of the western, which means it’ll be hard to find, read by die-hards, and SF itself will be scattered throughout the bookstore in other genres—unless the gatekeepers, the editors and publishers, start making SF accessible again and somehow convince readers to go back to the SF aisle in the bookstore.

YA may prove me wrong here. SF growth in YA is astounding, and those  editors aren’t in the mainstream of SF. They understand that sometimes the old tropes are the best tropes. Plus the stories are accessible and they have voice, something SF lost in the past 30 years (or maybe never really had, except for folks like Douglas Adams).

Q: Tell me a little bit about your days as editor of F&SF. What impact do you think you had on the field? How did the experience impact you as a writer?

Rusch: I don’t know about the impact I had on the field. That’s for others to decide. Maybe it came in all the new writers whose first stories I bought at F&SF and Pulphouse. Many of those writers are still working in the genre.

As for me, I learned all kinds of business things–the economics of  publishing, how editors/publishers think, why rejection isn’t personal. I also realized that writers can be real dumb, and the ones who had no idea of business were the worst. I have a mountain of bad-behaving writer stories, many from some well-known names, stories I’ll never share outside of a private conversation.

I also have a lot of respect for the editors and publishers toiling in the field. Even though I say that the gatekeepers need to open the gates and I criticize the way the SF category has been going, I still know how hard it is every single day for editors to get the work done, for publishers to sell books and still make a profit. I know these folks are in the business for the love of it, just like writers are.

Q: But surely there IS some difference in the requirements between SF for a mainstream audience and that for the (possibly shrinking) core audience. You’ve said as much yourself, where you observe that much SF has made itself closed-off and boring to outsiders. For example, an opening line like “The jumpship dropped out of null-space three parsecs from Rigel IV” isn’t going to work in a story aimed at a mainstream audience, particularly in the story itself is an answer to something H. Beam Piper wrote in Analog in 1962. So how do you solve the accessibility problem? “Good writing” would not seem to be enough.

Rusch: My bad. I didn’t define good writing. To me, “good writing” is clear and understandable. That sentence you quoted is only understandable to a small subset of the SF audience, therefore it fails the good writing test. If you’re going to introduce words like “jumpship” and “null-space,” don’t do it all in one sentence. Do it in a page or so, and explain a little.

The only folks who can get away with something like that are people who  write 35-book series, and they think their readers know all this stuff already. (That’s why the later books in a fantasy series are often inaccessible to new readers.)

SF has done this for far too long, and it should really stop. Have some  respect for your audience. Not everyone has combed used bookstores for  iconic novels before they approached yours.

Q: As for mainstream audiences vs. SF audiences and their relative sizes, it can work in reverse. James Morrow described to me in an early interview how he was published as mainstream, reviewed in Newsweek and in other places that would never review SF, but he didn’t actually sell very many books until This Is the Way the World Ends reprinted by the SF Book Club and the science fiction audience discovered him. And any SF fan has whole shelves of rare and half-forgotten and often brilliant SF or fantasy novels which cannot be reprinted these days because the author is forgotten in the mainstream and lacks sufficient genre recognition. Examples that come to mind include Limbo by Bernard Wolfe and The Unfortunate Fursey by Mervyn Wall. I have a lot more. Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow may fall into this category within 20 years. David Hartwell pointed out in a recent issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction [Aug 2009] that even so famous a “mainstream” work as T.H. White’s The Once and Future King crossed over into the fantasy genre sometime in the 1970s and is now found in the fantasy section of the bookstore. The implication is that if this had not happened, it might be out of print. So aren’t there times when being recognized as part of the SF genre club is actually to the writer’s advantage?

Rusch: There’s an assumption to your question, Darrell, that these genres are static. Jim Morrow’s experience from 25 years ago is irrelevant today. If he had published that book now, he’d probably do a lot better in the mainstream than in SF. In fact, it seems to me, his latest books have more mainstreamy covers than SF covers.

Why is T.H. White mainstream? I found his book in the fantasy section as a kid. My copy of that book looks like Tolkien, and I have had it since the early 1970s. Marketing is marketing is marketing–which I need to remind our readers is what we’re talking about. We need to get folks into our section of the bookstore or, failing that, we need to position our books in other parts of the store. I’m making the assumption that the books we all like are high quality. Just not easy to find.

Q: T. H. White is or was mainstream because he was originally published that way. The paperbacks from the ’60s often mention the musical Camelot in their blurbs, but never Tolkien. The hardcovers to this day — since Putnam never changed the jacket — are decidedly mainstream. There was no fantasy category in the ’50s. The edition you’re describing is clearly a post-crossover, “fantasy” one. The current Ace edition describes the book as the “gold standard” by which all fantasy novels are measured. When the first edition came out, the concept of a “fantasy novel” would not have been understood. Indeed, in the early ’70s Lin Carter told me that he had a great deal of trouble getting the concept of “adult fantasy” across, even to many of the writers who submitted manuscripts to him.

Rusch: That’s because in the 1920s, fantasy/fairy tales became relegated to children’s literature. Of course, in the 1920s, the concept of children’s literature was born as a marketing concept.

If what you say about T.H. White is true, then entire generations of SF/F  readers probably never read him. The lines between marketing genres were a  lot more solid in those days. So no wonder he had a revival in the 1990s, when the fantasy audience discovered him.

That’s the key: getting discovered by your audience, whatever it is.

Q: Maybe you’re not quite old enough to remember what it was like to be a  fantasy reader before there was a genre? I barely am. A science fiction reader before about 1970 had a clearly labeled product. A fantasy reader did not. One of the key stills for any fantasy reader was finding the fantastic in books not ostensibly labeled. A few were disguised as science fiction, such as de Camp’s The Incomplete Enchanter, a few were published as children’s books, like A Wizard of Earthsea, but most fantasy was to be found, unlabeled, in the mainstream. You had to know that T.H. White or James Branch Cabell or Lord Dunsany were fantasy writers. This was precisely the skill Lin Carter utilized to create the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, and from that, the fantasy category. Before that, there were few guidelines. The Anthony Boucher’s book reviews in F&SF in the ’50s made a point of mentioning fantasy published in the mainstream, including first-publication reviews of some obscure, non-genre trilogy by a certain Professor Tolkien, which didn’t become a fantasy category item until a decade later.

Rusch: You’re right, Darrell. I don’t think I bought my own books before 1970. I  was ten in 1970 and read everything in the house. (Imagine my mother’s dismay when she caught me reading Harold Robbins at 9.) My parents were not SF/F readers. My sister was, but didn’t know it. She sent me books all the time. In fact, she’s the one who gave me The Once and Future King, as well as C.S. Lewis, The Wind in the Willows, and The Lord of the Rings (although she gave me that when I was in high school–winter of 1977, to be exact, because I had mono and read the entire thing with a 103 temperature).

I did read a lot of gothics and ghost stories and books like The Witch of Blackbird Pond [by Elizabeth George Speare], but I can’t remember buying a fantasy novel until I was in high school at least. Which corresponds to what you’re saying here. I do remember the scandal when Terry Brooks hit the Times list, so I was in the genre at that point–or I was at least dabbling in it.—

Q: So, what are you working on now? What can readers expect from you in the near future?

Rusch: I’m doing a lot of short fiction right now. So go to the magazines, folks!  Look at my website for current news.

My next novel is SF, however. It’s called Diving into the Wreck, and it has  one of the greatest covers I’ve seen. I’d buy this book based on the cover, even if I didn’t know the author. (I’m thrilled. It’s a modern Andre Norton cover–and representative of the book.) [To be published by Pyr, November 2009.]

Readers can expect the unexpected from me, as usual. Different  genres. Different lengths. Different styles. Impossible to pin down. That’s  me.

Q: Thanks Kris.