I'd always been resistant to our cultural assumptions about science fiction -- that it's predictive and it's about the future. All science fiction is in one way or another about the moment in which it's written, even if the people who write it don't know that. My fourth, fifth and sixth novels were written in the early '90s but take place around 2007. Not only is it a world that now could never have happened but the characters, and this was a deliberate decision, act and talk like people from the '90s. I would always say, I could set one of these in the present and it wouldn't feel that different. I finally decided with "Pattern Recognition" to call myself on it and see if I could do it. It proved much harder and more disorienting than I had imagined it would be.This interview gives me the best possible feeling (though unactable-upon just now), that yearning need to write a new novel myself to think some of this stuff through!
(Link courtesy of The Dizzies.)
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