I first met Dan Bloom 'across the universe,' as he says, a couple of weeks ago when he commented on my tweet, @ElizaMood, referring to my novel, 'O Man of Clay,' as 'clifi.' I had been having difficulties finding a genre for the novel that felt quite comfortable and was toying with the notion of clifi, a relatively new term to me. I didn't think I had written a dystopia as the thrust of my book was a search to find some way out of something that was only part way there. I had wondered about eco-fiction but wasn't sure whether I would be making too grandiose a claim. And yet, while the novel refers to climate science and there is a perfectly good genre already out there—science fiction—I felt that there was an awkwardness of fit; something about the messiness of now that my characters are enmeshed in, their not having stepped out of our present dilemmas, their closeness to the present day that didn't quite sit comfortably there. After all, one of the main character's backstory is inspired by recent history. On the other hand, the book is certainly speculative - and literary in the sense of being about ideas and in its attention to the rhythms of language. Anyway, I did a bit of reading around Clifi, a term coined by Dan Bloom about five years ago, and tried it out for size.
And when Dan asked would I like to be interviewed for his blog, I was thrilled; here perhaps was a location for 'O Man of Clay.'
You can find the two interviews he did with me here, along with a rich seam of other authors:
http://northwardho.blogspot.com/
Here is an interview with Dan himself. There are others if you dig around, and Dan's own novel is imminent:
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/su...
You can find the two interviews he did with me here, along with a rich seam of other authors:
http://northwardho.blogspot.com/
Here is an interview with Dan himself. There are others if you dig around, and Dan's own novel is imminent:
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/su...