Ask the Author: Francis Spufford
Answered Questions (5)
Francis Spufford
Sadly, no. I have to remain closed of mouth for now. When or if there is something to report, I shall shout about it here, I promise.
Francis Spufford
Ash, I'm sorry but you can't at the moment. It has to stay under wraps to keep me out of legal trouble. But the situation does seem to be changing very slightly and slowly, and the moment there is any news, you can be sure that I will be shouting it to the rooftops, here and everywhere else.
Thank you for *wanting* to read it; sorry to be disappointing.
Thank you for *wanting* to read it; sorry to be disappointing.
Francis Spufford
Michael, unless something changes I am going to have to wait until Narnia comes out of copyright. If you want to ask me anything else about it, you could look me up on the website of Goldsmiths College, where I teach; that would show you a way to reach me.
Francis Spufford
I suppose it's that, to me, Saint Leibowitz is a book that lets itself get closer to what Walter Miller felt about Catholicism. It's a less well made book than A Canticle, obviously – baggy, unsure of itself, and left unfinished at his death, so that the published version is partly the (brilliant) work of Terry Bisson. But A Canticle's higher polish is (I think) to do with it being a more conventional 1950s/60s SF novel, laying out its future dark age, recovery, and cyclic return to nuclear war with a kind of grim, satirical neatness. It's got a thesis about how monasteries preserve knowledge in dark times, and it has fun with historical parallels, but the Leibowitz manuscripts the monks lovingly illuminate really are random scraps of shopping list. I think it was a story that wanted to be wilder, and that the sequel he wrestled with is what happened when he let it be wilder.
Gene Wolfe, I am not the person to ask about. I am making my way successfully, and with some actual pleasure, through the Book of the Long Sun novels, at a friend's recommendation, but this is the first time I've managed to enjoy him. Neither The Fifth Head of Cerberus, nor the Book of the New Sun, which are supposed to be his sure-fire works of sf'nal genius, could I get anywhere with. They're too cruel for me, and I'm also too impatient with their encryptedness. I'd much rather read something with a simple surface that suggests multiple complex meanings, than something with a complex surface beneath which hides a single simple meaning. It may be relevant that I'm useless at both crosswords and Scrabble.
Gene Wolfe, I am not the person to ask about. I am making my way successfully, and with some actual pleasure, through the Book of the Long Sun novels, at a friend's recommendation, but this is the first time I've managed to enjoy him. Neither The Fifth Head of Cerberus, nor the Book of the New Sun, which are supposed to be his sure-fire works of sf'nal genius, could I get anywhere with. They're too cruel for me, and I'm also too impatient with their encryptedness. I'd much rather read something with a simple surface that suggests multiple complex meanings, than something with a complex surface beneath which hides a single simple meaning. It may be relevant that I'm useless at both crosswords and Scrabble.
Francis Spufford
Bryce, hello. I’ve thought about this - thought about it a lot, for obvious reasons - and the conclusion I’ve kept coming to is that it wouldn’t work. I wasn’t incidentally using the places and persons that constitute the difficulty. They were the point, the reason why I was doing it. And what I devised was shaped the way it was shaped as a story in order to fit into a very exact space defined by the existing books. So I can’t move it to another kingdom containing another lion. I’m afraid we’ll just have to wait in hope.
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