CJ Cherryh has been in front of a great many themes now commonplace at ComicCon and elsewhere. Readers and fans have acknowledged her chops by voting her three Hugo Awards, three Nebula Awards, and fistfuls of other accolades over an illustrious thirty-year career. Her worlds of the imagination range from deep space to the Russian forests, from the intricacies of the human heart to the vaudeville of Hell itself. Her novels Downbelow Station, Finity’s End, Cyteen and others, set during the “Company Wars” of the 25th Century, built up a gritty, realistic universe of working men and women surpassing the similar visions of the Alien series or Blade Runner. Cyteen is, in this writer’s opinion, the finest exploration of the ramifications of human cloning yet written. Her Foreigner series has long explored the conflicted loyalties of a human envoy to an alien world, while her Fortress in the Eye of Time and its sequels form a heroic fantasy as deep and rich as those of the acknowledged masters of the genre.
FM: Please talk about your connections to Forrest J Ackerman and “Famous Monsters of Filmland”.
CJ: I knew Forry when I was a novice as a published writer. I remember he had Bela Lugosi’s ring, quite a massive silver and onyx piece, which he wore. Once at a room party, someone happened to ask me about early books I’d read, and I happened to mention Anthony Gilmore’s Space Hawk, which it seemed only Robert Heinlein had read — he referenced it in Glory Road. I commented that I thought it was interesting because of its social impact: the copilot in the story, the sane guy whose principal role was to keep the hero from going off the deep end, was the hero’s best buddy, a black man, which was revolutionary at the time it was written. Forry happened to be sitting next to me, and he exclaimed, speaking of Gilmore, “He was a client of mine!” Well, I was amazed. And what should happen a month later, when I was back home and when I had totally forgotten the conversation, but a package from Forry, and a note that this was for me. It was a copy of Space Hawk. I was delighted to find it still read very well. Forry was, to my experience, a very sweet and generous man.
FM: What were and are the major artistic influences upon you?
CJ: Well, classical: I was a Latin-Greek major, and spent a lot of time trying to cram Vergilius Maro’s concepts into equally terse English. A hard job, I’ll tell you. My father started me off on Edgar Rice Burroughs when I was about 7, and after that, I hunted down ‘the good stuff’, be it Jack Williamson, Andre Norton, Burroughs, Frank Baum (when I was 7 and broke my arm), and Robert E. Howard.
FM: What interests you in imaginative entertainment today?
CJ: Besides books — I like certain animes, like Bleach, Descendants of Darkness, Kyo Kara Maoh, Saiyuki…
FM: If you could bring to life a lost or forgotten work, which one would it be?
CJ: Probably Gilmore; maybe Jeffrey Farnol — an American writer of adventure novels who had to go to England to get published; I liked H Rider Haggard, too — a little wordy by today’s standards, but Eric Brighteyes was always a favorite. Not to mention the “gateway” books of science fiction, the juveniles that used to give new readers an easy bridge into the field, and that now are hard to find: Andre Norton, CL Moore, Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, Asimov’s juveniles, Leigh Brackett… If you can’t find them otherwise, look online. More and more SF works are turning up as e-books. I’m putting out my own backlist that way — but be sure you get them from a source that pays the writer or the writer’s estate! Don’t patronize the pirates!
FM: Thanks, CJ — we won’t!
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