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If you were casting a Cornelius movie, who would play Jerry? Did you know he’s from my hometown?

You’re from Notting Hill? Not sure who—but Tilda Swinton is still my favourite choice. Someone did a Photoshop of her as Elric, which also worked very well. That’s in the Image Gallery on my site, I think.

I was thinking about Johnny Depp.

Him too. But he’s too busy playing pirate these days.

What kind of car do you drive? (I ask this of everyone.) Did you have a car in the Old Country?

We have an old Lexus SUV, which we bought new and cheap when my leg needed more room because of the wound, and that was about the only car that would take me.

I briefly owned a beautiful Citroën classic convertible with running boards and stuff. In the 1970s, I had a massive Nash (that’s what I conquered the Pennine Way in), which in England was like driving a bus. I bought it because it could take a load of children and a load of band members.

But after our Fiat, we mostly had a Honda Civic in the UK. Linda made me stop driving when she discovered I didn’t have a license. I’m useless at tests and exams. So although the driving instructor said all I needed were a couple of lessons and I’d sail through, I got worse and worse as we went along and gave it up as a lost cause.

Texas is littered with Lost Causes.

We mostly used public transport in London and we still use mostly public transport in France and the rest of Europe. I’m still an advocate for good public systems. One of my reasons formoving to Texas was because the then Democratic state governor wanted to bring a TGV to Texas and a light rail system for Austin.

I was very disappointed when Bush became governor.

You floated an interesting concept in Gloriana when you said that modern art’s relentless demand for novelty made bad artists worse, but good artists better. How does that work?

I don’t remember writing that! I can see how it might work, though. I think there are plenty of good journeyman painters and scriveners whose talents are wasted by attempted novelty. I was probably thinking of what happened on New Worlds when perfectly good run-of-the-mill writers tried to produce what they thought were New Wave stories and came up with crap, whereas good writers who were encouraged to expand (Disch, Aldiss, Ballard) produced superb stuff.

Do you regard the fact that SF is still a commercially viable literature a help or a hindrance?

It doesn’t matter a lot. I liked it better before publishers didn’t know what sold. There was a good patch that lasted into the 1980s even, when publishers were so uncertain about what the public liked that they were willing to give almost anything a go. By the 1990s, they’d worked out what sold and what didn’t, and you saw a slowing down of interesting offbeat material and a tendency for categories and sub-categories of generic stuff to become the norm.

I think it gets harder and harder to sell new stuff—stuff that breaks conventions —because now publishers and booksellers “know the market” and know what will sell (i.e., what did sell). So the chances of selling an offbeat novel masquerading in a commercial form get slimmer all the time.

I liked SF precisely for that potential for masquerade— avant-garde pretending to be space opera …

Ever get through The Faerie Queene? Ulysses?

Yes. Gloriana riffed off The Faerie Queene. Ulysses is best enjoyed when read aloud, as is Proust. But if you can read Pamela by Richardson or One of Our Conquerors by Meredith, you can probably read anything. It’s books like Dune or Lord of the Rings that I find almost unreadable.

You are one of SF’s most “literary” writers, and at the same time a militant populist in literature, opposed to high-canon thinking. How do you reconcile those roles?

By demonstration.

An innovative artist must create his own audience as he goes. Do you see yourself as an educator or an entertainer? (“Both” is a cheat.)

Both. I have been both most of my life. I’ve had magazines in