What appeals to you about speculative fiction? What about the genre do you dislike, if anything?

"What appeals to you about speculative fiction?" is a strangely difficult question to answer. I have a pet theory that most genre writers were kids who became book junkies before adolescence. For us as readers, a book with magic in it was a promise that something cool was going to happen.

Now, years later and writing books myself, I read more outside the genre than in ... but I still find I want to make that promise to a reader right up front: trust me--something cool is going to happen.

I'm not sure there's anything I dislike about speculative fiction per se. That is, bad writin' is bad writin', whether it's in a quest fantasy or a techno-thriller.

...I suppose there are things I distrust in SF. It is, obviously, often escapist writing, which means that somewhere along the line you have to wonder about "escape" -- about where "liberation" blurs into "flight." Understand: I am a junkie warning about the dangers of the drug, but around the time people start referring to their own actual lives as happening "in mundania," I think you can begin to worry. In a sideways manner, my novel Clouds End is a fantasy novel trying to grapple with the temptations of fantasy novels.

How do you define magic realism?

I politely decline to, if at all possible. :-) I find taxonomical debate--"But is Star Wars really science fiction, or is it actually fantasy?"--generally unproductive. "Magic realism" was a label created essentially to describe One Hundred Years of Solitude, and subsequently applied to a wide variety of writing with non-realistic elements basically as a code phrase for "No Elves Here." The fact that the term gets used so much--particularly in north America--is mainly due to the amazing success of the sinister alliance between the Johns (Campbell and Steinbeck) who, in a secret meeting in 1934, drew up a compact dividing the literary landscape into two unnatural fiefdoms. Eventually the term ought to fade into oblivion, like the rubble of the Berlin Wall, once everybody remembers that Hawthorne was a "magic realist," as were Shakespeare and Dante and Homer.

WARNING: the last paragraph contains something that is Not True. The 1934 Pulp/Fiction concord was, of course, between Hugo Gernsback and Ernest Hemingway.

What kills creativity?

Too much imagination.

Not too much depth, but too much breadth. Real creativity eventually requires that the artist be responding to the world. One mistake SF tends to is that we make too much stuff up, and as a result it feels thin and faked. (Remember computer animation circa 1985?) Creativity burns hottest, I think, when you set fire to the real.

Among your own novels do you have a favourite?

It's more that each book has its different traits which I particularly like (or disapprove of). I am also not really an excellent judge of how the books read to other people; I tend to think of the books as they ought to have been, not as my own flawed transcriptions of them. (For one thing, I can't read any of the published versions of my books, so I am quite literally unable to experience them as readers do.)

Is that a dodge? I like the character warmth in Nobody's Son, I like the opening conceit in Resurrection Man, and the degree to which I folded together magic and characterization in that book. I like the voice of Diane from Passion Play, I like the Texas in Mockingbird, and the relationship between the sisters, and the fact that the book was very well received when my spirits about my career were at a low ebb. I like the huge architectural underpinnings of Clouds End, and wish I'd had my current level of skill when tackling so vast a set of subjects; but then if I hadn't been twenty-four, I might not have dared start such an ambitious novel. I think the even-numbered chapters from 10 to 16 in The Night Watch are all pretty good, and I'm pretty pleased with the last page and a half of Galveston.

Are there any your universes that you would like to revisit, would like to write more about?

Not right now. I've done three semi-linked books in the world of Resurrection Man, and I've done three books about Texas (including the novel I'm still working on, which has a lot of affinities with Mockingbird).

Mockingbird is one of my desert island books...

Bless you...

...I would have to have it with me. Do you have any books that fall into that category? Books you can read and reread until they're falling apart?

Pride and Prejudice and The Lord of the Rings.

In the bio on your site, you mention receiving a copy of The Hobbit on your seventh birthday. Have you seen Fellowship of the Ring, and if so what did you think of the film?

Seen it, yes, several times. Like everyone, I have my quibbles (what was with the World Wizard Federation Smackdown, anyway????)--but, speaking as a fanatic here, rather than John Q Moviegoer, I was really happy with the way Jackson & Crew tried their level best to match Tolkien's gravitas in their treatment of the subject. They took it damn seriously, and I appreciated that.

If you could give a beginning writer one piece of advice, what would it be?

"Everything you write for a very long time is going to suck. Don't let that rattle you. Keep working anyway. When you feel, inside, that you ought to be quite talented, only what you actually write is fairly terrible, you are just finding out that there are a lot of skills involved in making a good book that take time to acquire. Nobody sits down at a concert piano for the first time and then is amazed to find they can't play like Chopin. We assume that being good readers will make us good writers, but alas, that seems not much more true than the idea that you can learn how to play the cello by listening to YoYo Ma CDs."

If I got a second piece of advice, it would probably be, "read outside the genre you are writing in."

I am familiar with your novels, but have you written and/or published short fiction as well?

I have published almost no short fiction. I have, on the other hand, written a gigantic online mystery/novel/immersive game associated with the Spielberg film A.I., and the total number of words I wrote for that last spring is easily as much as one of my longer novels.

Galveston is out in mass-market paperback now; what can readers expect next from you?

Another book set in Houston, Texas, this time a psychological thriller about an ex-punk who sees ghosts.

And I'll bet you any money the words "magic realism" will appear somewhere on the cover....

Thanks, Sean! Readers, you can learn more about Sean's novels on his beautiful website: seanstewart.org.