I wrote the two Parable books back in the '90s. And they are books about, as I said, what happens because we don't trouble to correct some of the problems that we’re brewing for ourselves right now. Global warming is one of those problems. And I was aware of it back in the ’80s. I was reading books about it. And a lot of people were seeing it as politics, as something very iffy, as something they could ignore because nothing was going to come of it tomorrow. That and the fact that I think I was paying a lot of attention to education because a lot of my friends were teachers, and the politics of education was getting scarier, it seemed to me. We were getting to that point where we were thinking more about the building of prisons than of schools and libraries. And I remember while I was working on the novels, my hometown, Pasadena, had a bond issue that they passed to aid libraries, and I was so happy that it passed, because so often these things don’t. And they had closed a lot of branch libraries and were able to reopen them. So, not everybody was going in the wrong direction, but a lot of the country still was. And what I wanted to write was a novel of someone who was coming up with solutions of a sort.
American science fiction writer (1947-2006)
I fell into writing it because I saw a bad movie, a movie called Devil Girl from Mars, and went into competition with it. But I think I stayed with it because it was so wide open. It gave me the chance to comment on every aspect of humanity. People tend to think of science fiction as, oh, Star Wars or Star Trek. And the truth is, there are no closed doors, and there are no required formulas. You can go anywhere with it.
("Are there social movements that you identify with or are inspired by?") OB: Not terribly. Not in the sense of joining something. I'm with the ABB-"Anybody But Bush"-movement right now [winter 2003]. For the first time in my life I was sending campaign donations to a political candidate-Dean, as a matter of fact, before he fell out. There are a lot of things that I care about, and I mention some of them with relation to the two Parable books. I belong to a lot of environmentalist organizations. I really feel that it's important we stop playing games, and the idea that we're somehow going to improve the forests by having people go in and chop down the most valuable trees is just obscene, and the idea that we are going to lose environmental legislation for clean air and clean water that earlier groups worked really hard for is obscene. I mean we're doing such unutterably stupid things that I can't not pay attention to it. Then there are things like war and peace, of course. I found the war [in Iraq] to be totally unnecessary, and I said so before we got into it. We're going down a lot of wrong paths. The books are warnings, they're "If this goes on..." novels. Nobody really needed warning, everybody could see that we're sliding in the wrong directions, especially with regard to things like global warming. But nothing is being done, at least on the part of our national government. (2003)
I know a lot of people are where I was several years ago, when I was getting started with writing, wondering how they might get started as writers. And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write-every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing. Second, read every day. Read voraciously and omnivorously, whatever's out there. You never know what's gonna grab you. Third, for people who aren't doing it already, take classes-they're worthwhile. Workshops or classes-a workshop is where you do actually get feedback on your work, not just something where you go and sit for a day. A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you're communicating what you think you're communicating. It's so easy as a young writer to think you're been very clear when in fact you haven't. Those are some of the suggestions I give to my young writers. (2004)
I think the most interesting thing about looking back now at the 1950s is how familiar things would be...We can do a lot of things faster, bigger, higher, that sort of thing, but they're essentially the same things. We're talking on the telephone. Now of course we could be going on computers, but even so we would be typing and looking at a screen and in those days we had typing and we had screens. We're connected. The cars might look different but they're still internal combustion engine cars for the most part. All the things that we thought, the flying cars, and buildings a mile high...The nonsense, I like to call it. The things that would make our era un-recognizable are mainly the social things. Imagine going back to the fifties and explaining that we're now discussing homosexual marriage. In the fifties, you didn't even hear the word homosexual, let alone that they might get married. I mean, black and white was illegal, forget two people of the same sex. And it was still OK to lynch people in different parts of our country. It was still OK to expect people to be openly racist in all parts of our country. Interesting how that goes in and out of fashion.
My favorite collection of slave narratives was a nineteen-volume set called The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. It was assembled in the 1930s by the Writer's Project [of the Works Progress Administration], and these people interviewed the slaves who were left, the very last ones. It was depressing reading not only because bad things happened to slaves, but because slavery could become so pedestrian when you read enough of it, so ordinary. I remember someone telling me that they'd read the Harriet Jacobs narrative, and they said it was mild compared to other slave narratives. And, horribly enough, it was, but that doesn't make her any less a slave. It wasn't something you'd want to undergo. (2003)
Obviously in some places you will meet with some nastiness, but it isn't general. The only place I was ever called "nigger," had someone scream nigger at me in public, was in Boston, for goodness sakes. It wasn't a person going to a conference, it was just a stranger who happened to see me standing, waiting for a traffic light. (1990)
When I began writing science fiction, when I began reading, heck, I wasn't in any of this stuff I read. The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn't manage anything, any way. I wrote myself in, since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing.
I did not read any Langston Hughes until I was an adult, but I remember being carried away by him and Gwendolyn Brooks. When I was growing up, the only blacks you came across in school were slaves-who were always well treated-and later, when we got to individuals, Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. Booker T. Washington started a college, and Carver did something with peanuts; we never knew what. We did not read anything by a black writer except [James Weldon] Johnson's The Creation, and that was in high school. We managed to get through adolescence without being introduced to any black culture. (1996)
I want to write about what's going to happen if we keep doing what we've been doing, if we keep recklessly endangering the environment, if we keep paying no attention to economic realities, if we keep paying no attention to educational needs, if we keep doing a lot of the things that are hurting us now. And that's what I wound up writing about. And everything else just kind of fell into it, fell into place.