Charles Platt (1) (1945–)

Some interesting interviews but also some frustrating ones, for example, the visit to Harlan Ellison is just a magazine type article about his lifestyle, with nothing about his writing, how he got started or anything else about writing. The book is quite uneven in essence. Also in the joint interview of Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight, there is a short discussion about why she is the only woman in the book, which boils down to "didn't want to ask women just because they were women" and gives the mitigation that he did ask Ursula Le Guin but she declined for personal reasons. And most women wrote fantasy which this book doesn't cover. The point is that at the time the interviews were conducted, there were well known women who wrote science fiction such as Joanna Russ and Anne McCaffrey, and others who were up and coming such as Octavia Butler and Suzy McKee Charnas. So it is a interesting collection of short interviews of prominent SF writers up to 1979, but with some big omissions and varying quality in the interviews.… (más)