A Quote by Christopher Fowler

I've always loved what I'd term 'dark fiction' writers, everyone from J. G. Ballard to Mervyn Peake and Philip Pullman. I'm not sure it's a genre, but it's what I like best.
I do like Philip Pullman.And that's an exception because Philip Pullman's books allow magic.
I loved literary science fiction. In fact, as a kid, when I was reading science fiction, I thought 'I can't wait for the future when the special effects are good' to represent what was in these books by Arthur C. Clarke, Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Jack Vance.
Many fantasy novels - 'Lord of the Rings', for instance, or 'Lavondyss' by Robert Holdstock - are beautifully written. Geoff Ryman's 'The Child Garden' is exquisite and utterly beguiling. Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast' trilogy is an astonishing piece of multi-faceted storytelling. So quality of writing does not condemn the genre.
Writers of all things speculative have played in alternate and parallel worlds for a long time - everyone from Stephen King to Philip Pullman to Tanith Lee - and it's an obsession that likely isn't going away any time soon.
In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we're now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals.
There are two trilogies I admire: Robertson Davies's 'The Deptford Trilogy' and Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials.'
J. G. Ballard is just an example of the writers I like. Philip K. Dick is obviously one of them. I'm a big fan of William Gibson as well. He started cyberpunk with 'Neuromancer.' I've come to know him a little bit over Twitter, of all places, and I was always a huge fan of his. It's very cool to know he even knows I exist.
I've been on 'Mastermind' - I tied for first place and then lost on the number of passes. My subject was the 'His Dark Materials' trilogy by Philip Pullman. If I did it again, I'd choose Shakespearian tragedies.
I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.
Philip Pullman and Jacqueline Wilson have both been writing for a long time. In 30 years, will writers of that quality have been able to serve the same sort of apprenticeship? Not unless they can make enough money now to live on.
Consensus wisdom has it that all modern commercial fantasy novels fall into two camps: those derived from J.R.R. Tolkien and those derived from Mervyn Peake. The 'Lord of the Rings' template or the 'Gormenghast' mold.
Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It (Gormenghast trilogy) is a very, very great work ... a classic of our age.
I do think that this represents a kind of shift towards myth, a recovery of myth, largely through the popularity of writers like Philip Pullman. Somehow myths have returned as a serious subject. It used to be scorned...really scorned. It was part of a nursery tradition, and it was also rather tainted - but not in an immovable way - by the association with right-wing ideologies after the World Wars.
If I'm a genre writer, I'm at the edge. In the end, they do work like genre fiction. You have a hero, there's a love interest, there's always a chase, there's fighting of some kind. You don't have to do that in a novel. But you do in a genre novel.
Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake.
I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.
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