Upcoming Interview with David Nickle on Friday February 15th
In our upcoming interview, David Nickle discusses coming of age as a writer of Canadian Speculative Fiction, particularly non-violent, anti-individualist storylines and a general sense of outsider identity that permeates the lives of many Canadian Spec Fic authors. He wants readers to question themselves and their reality, challenge their preconceptions, and experience those moments of “scary transcendence” that are embodied in Speculative Fiction.
David Nickle shares aspects of his personal life, insights into Speculative Fiction, society, love, horror, and collaborative writing.
Here are some teasers for our upcoming interview:
David Nickle: “A lot of my fiction, particularly my contemporary horror fiction, hinges on a sense of place”
David Nickle: “My Canadian identity has for many years as a writer, contributed rightly or wrongly to my sense of being an outlier. Coming of age as a writer, I was constantly faced with the notion that as a Canadian speculative fiction writer, my fiction either ought to or possibly does deal with humanity cast against a hostile environment—Susanna Moody in Space as it were—or in preaching non-violent, anti-individualist solutions to problems that an American writer might just shoot full of holes with a space blaster.”
David Nickle: “That’s what I want to evoke in my work—the quiet and terrifying wonderful of the unknowable void.”
David Nickle: “I like body horror as a writer (less so as a reader) because it is a pretty literal and direct route to getting under a reader’s skin. From the time we hit puberty, the spectacle of our changing bodies is a constant preoccupation, and I think a universal.”
David Nickle: “I can’t write about the incursion of the strange and supernatural into a world, without that world functioning for the most part according to realistic rules.”
David Nickle: “Probably the mythology that most influences me, though, is the collection of ideas, conceits and dreams that come together in the 1970s New Age movement.”
David Nickle: “I think outsiders are useful in spec fic for entirely technical reasons: they provide a viewpoint that allows readers to enter a strange and complicated world, and learn about it from the ground up. Outsiders can function variously as students, as critics, and as disruptive elements. They make the story go around.”
David Nickle: “But I think that all fiction, all stories, follow a dream-logic. Because fundamentally, they’re waking dreams, and just as sleeping dreams are a kind of cognitive narrative that we impose on thoughts and memories, so are the waking dreams that are fiction.”
Check out our interview on Friday, February 15th.
If you are not yet familiar with David Nickle’s work, check out my review of The Claus Effect at http://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/12/22/big-red-suit-scare-a-midwinter-cold-war/ and explore David Nickle’s website at http://davidnickle.blogspot.ca/ .
