A Sime~Gen Interview with Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Interviews by Fans
Title:
Interviewer:	Linda Deneroff
Interviewee:	Jacqueline Lichtenberg
Date(s):	conducted June 1976, printed December 1976
Medium:	print
Fandom(s):	Sime~Gen
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A Sime~Gen Interview with Jacqueline Lichtenberg was conducted by Linda Deneroff on June 18, 1976 at the collating session for the first issue of Ambrov Zeor!.

first page

The interview was published in the December issue of Ambrov Zeor!.

Excerpts

JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG(JL): When I was about ten years old, my mother smuggled me a science-fiction book from the adult library. I started reading and read everything there was in the adult library. It didn't take me many years to go through It. Then the Ace started coming out with Ace Doubles and I started spending every last cent I had on those. Well, I made a stack of about 12, 15 books which had struck me as being superlative or which had moved me In some particular way; in other words, which had my particular tailored effect in them, but I felt the author had done something wrong because they'd ignored the real story in favor of the action/adventure. I distilled out of each book one element that I liked and then I put them together into a story premise or a series premise, which had all the things in it that I liked in all these different books, a complete concentration. I figured I could spend my lifetime writing in this universe because it has everything that I like in it and I'm never gonna get tired of exploring it. So that's essentially how I arrived at the Simes! I stole it from everybody in sight — everybody from A.E. van Vogt to Asimov,

LD: But I meant the Simes, specifically; how did you conceive of the idea?

JL: That comes out of the subconscious! What you do is read a lot of books, make this stack of books that you like and then read them all three or four times in sequence and then just -- I don't know! -- meditate until (an idea) just sort of arises out of your subconscious.

JL: No, no, no. I'm telling a story. The hero of the Sime series is not the Ferris that I'm writing about; it's the clash between the Tecton and the Distect.

LD: Or between the Simes and the Gens.

JL: Or between the Simes and the Gens, depending on how you look at it, but I see it as the clash between the Tecton and the Distect. Marion's Darkover series, I see as a clash between the Terran Empire and the Darkovon culture.

LD: May I make a suggestion?

JL: Yeah.

LD: Finish off a story! You seem to leave yourself openings for another story between Hugh and Klyd, but I don't think we will ever see that story, at least not professionally.

JL: Do you want to know how that happened? That's the result of being a neo-writer. HOUSE OF ZEOR is the first third of a book that I had mapped out and I had it plotted and all outlined to go fifty thousand words. The first twenty thousand words was the story that appears in HOUSE OF ZEOR. There was no way to tell that story in twenty thousand words. It turned out to be eighty-seven thousand words. Now, as a beginning writer trying to sell a first novel, there is no way I'm going to sell a science fiction first novel which is longer than a hundred thousand words. So I sold the first third of the thing, and I figured I'd write an immediate sequel as the second part of it. And then I got horsing around and messing around with it and I decided -- everybody liked "Lortuen". Everybody agreed that it was not professional publishable because the background was not clear enough so it would have to be expanded. If I expanded it -- well, it would turn into a novel. But everybody liked the changeover in that scene. So that was the one that I wrote because Marion liked it, Debbie liked it, all the fans loved it.