http://www.tommerritt.com/2013/06/25/sl-podcast-134-interview-with-gene-wolfe/ "S&L Podcast ? #134 — Interview with Gene Wolfe"; from the Nebula Awards
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Were you expecting a wrap-up episode for Among Others? Sorry kids, Veronica decided to go on vacation, and all you get is this lousy interview with legendary author Gene Wolfe. Just kidding, the interview is awesome.
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/SlPodcast-134-InterviewWithGeneWolfe/134SlPodcast-134-InterviewWithGeneWolfe.mp3
(47M; 34:28)
Interview starts 02:04, ends 33:37.
Topics:
- 'science fiction' vs 'fantasy' and 'science fantasy';
- "Beach Hill";
- on another Latro book ('I don't know if I will ever write another
Latro book; I may. Those take a lot of research.');
- ancient Egyptian society, the Persian empire;
- at ~12m, Borges (Wolfe 'went through a period in which I read all
the Borges I could find and I also went to a lecture of his. I never actually got to meet him but I did see him in the flesh. I was sitting in the audience and [inaudible] he was just the most marvelous man...2 young people from the Spanish department, and they say 'we are from the Spanish department [University] and we're here to interpret to interpret for Signor Borges as necessary, and he begins to speak and he has English down absolutely pat - he has a Spanish accent, yes, but he has a bigger vocabulary than 90% of the audience and I never heard him make a grammatical mistake...He was great.'), Wolfe mentions 'The Garden of Forking Paths';
- Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill & The Man Who Was Thursday;
- Charles Dickens, where Wolfe brings up a personal story about
reading Pickwick Papers at 14, a friend starting to talk like Mr. Jingles, who went on to become an Air Force psychologist, met a 'tragic' end, Wolfe misses him, and he brought the friend back in a story whose name he couldn't recall;
- the Pringle machines and the clever way the Pringle shape assists manufacture; Wolfe claims that when the fresh Pringles come out of the salter, they are 'unspeakably delicious';
- screenrights (Shadow of the Torturer options sold '2 or 3 times');
- on the upcoming Shadows of the New Sun story anthology ('some of
my characters as handled by other people, but not as handled by me');
to help with money issues related to Rose being in the nursing home (arthritis, Alzheimer's) and difficulties in reimbursement (at ~30m)
- The Land Across; "it's about a young American to travels to an
obscure liberal eastern European country who gets into all sorts of trouble; and as I told someone, there are two attractive young women and there's an attractive old woman; there's a crazy cult; there's a truly evil cult; and much other stuff stuff - boats and so on, and when I got through giving the whole description I thought 'my god I forgot dogs and motorcycles! No dogs and motorcycles.' He goes to prison and he ends up as a member of the secret police of this little east European dictatorship and - and I had a lot of fun"
gwern
http://www.gwern.net