Richard Morgan interview

[Keith]

- Honestly, do you believe that the speculative fiction genre will  
ever come to be recognized as veritable literature? Truth be told, in  
my opinion there has never been this many good books/series as we  
have right now, and yet there is still very little respect (not to  
say none) associated with the genre.

Honestly, I think speculative fiction has already smashed its way  
pretty conclusively out of that particular ghetto. Look – Cormac  
McCarthy published his first speculative fiction novel, The Road,  
last year, and it just made Oprah! I mean, how much more integration  
into the mainstream do you want? On this side of the Atlantic, Philip  
Pullman and Susannah Clark have both been taken to the bosom of the  
literary establishment, and in the US William Gibson is considered a  
literary Grand Old Man these days. And on the other side of the coin,  
we have Haruki Murakami and Thomas Pynchon, who both rank comfortably  
among the world’s most highly regarded living literary practitioners,  
and who both write what can only be described as speculative fiction.  
What’s more, Pynchon is very clearly a fan of, and wry borrower from,  
some very pulpy SF indeed, and Murakami’s last novel, Kafka on the  
Shore, included scenarios that wouldn’t have looked amiss in The  
Thing, The X-Files and The Chronicles of Narnia. So as far as the  
Great Escape of Speculative Fiction is concerned, we’re already over  
the wall and running.

http://tinyurl.com/2xou3h