Interview with C.J. Cherryh
/Late last year, I wrote about C.J. Cherryh about her career for Kirkus Reviews. During the research process, Cherryh kindly agreed to be interviewed. Here's our conversation: Andrew Liptak: Where did you first come across science fiction, and what about it made you stick with reading it?
CJ Cherryh: My dad gave me a copy of Tarzan and the City of Gold---when I was about 7. Before that it was comics. I graduated to Conan at about 9-10. Read every 'lost world' I could find and was a fanatic listener to Tom Corbett on radio. When I found books of the same ilk, I read them. Age 9-10 family got a telly and I got addicted to Flash Gordon. Beyond that, I wrote my own.
AJL: I saw that you had begun writing when you were disappointed with the cancellation of your favorite television show at a young age. Did you continue to write between that time and when you began to publish professionally?
CJC: Yes. Daily.
AJL: Where did you first come up with your first novel, Gate of Ivrel? What was the writing and publication process like?
CJC: I'd sent Don [Wollheim] Brothers of Earth and he sent me a letter saying it wasn't quite in their size range. First time I'd gotten a publisher to answer in person, so I wrote Gate in 2 months while teaching a full schedule. Ate at the keyboard, slept when I could.
AJL: How did Donald Wollheim first come across your stories at DAW Books?
CJC: I targeted Don, finally taking a systematic approach to sending out books, because I went through my own library and investigated who was the editor who had bought most of my favorite books---figured we had similar taste.
AJL: Serpent's Reach was your first Union-Alliance novel. How did you go about constructing that world? Was there anything particularly different about the writing and publication process from your earlier novels?
CJC: I don't know that it was the first. But I researched real astronomy to find a couple of stars in the right relationship and built the ecology based on what I thought might result from that class star. (Beta Hydri.)
[Her first was Brothers of Earth - this question was the result of me misreading her ISFBD entry]
AJL: Your novels are notable for their female protagonists in a field that was considered male-dominated: how was this received by readers while they were being published?
CJC: My goal is to create characters that men can identify with just the same as women identify with the male heroes. Everybody wants to be a hero in what they're reading.
What some of the Union-Alliance influences? I decided to set up a situation in which there were no 'evil' superpowers, just superpowers doing what superpowers do re their own survival, and to write stories from the viewpoint of people on both sides.
AJL: Who were some of the authors who inspired you?
CJC: Jack Williamson, Robert Heinlein, Don Wollheim, Andre Norton, and Publius Vergilius Maro.
C.J. Cherryh is an author that I've come across quite a lot, but was never one that I really ever got into. Recently, I've become more interested in her books, particularly Downbelow Station, which prompted me to take a look at her career. It's a facinating one that pulls in some of the legacies of her predecessors (such as Robert Heinlein and similar), and newer innovations that made her career different than that of her predecessors: she was primarily a novelist, rather than someone who started in the pulp magazines.