3 Minutes with Bill, Co-Editor of Future Fictions: New Dimensions in International Science Fiction

Bill Campbell, co-editor of Future Fictions, included in the Innovative Worlds storybundle available until August 27th, cracks open the door on his motivations, process, and thoughts on speculative fiction and innovation.

What’s your favorite innovation of the last 25 years? The last 5?

BC: I’m not sure. However, another music fiend and I were talking the other day about how much we love that we can access our entire music collections on our phone. If the rest of the world weren’t so clearly going to hell, I’d call this heaven!

Do you have any writing tics?

BC: The thing that annoys me most about myself, writing wise, is that before I start writing any project, I go through this excruciating period of self-flagellation where I think I’m the dumbest person on the planet and have no business writing. It takes a minute to snap out of it, but in an odd way it gives me hope because then I know I’m ready to start writing.

Does speculative fiction have a role in innovation? If so, what is it?

BC: Whenever I run into someone who says that they don’t like speculative fiction, I tell them whatever device, etc., they see in the world was first thought up in a book. But perhaps more importantly, there are questions and problems in the past, present, and future that many authors have wrestled with in their works. That’s what makes the genre so fascinating. Perhaps asking those questions is our role.

What’s on your desk?

BC: My head. I’m exhausted.

What’s the first book you really connected with? Made you cry? Laugh out loud?

BC: For me it was all about S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. For more reasons than I care to go into here, I pretty much felt like an outsider everywhere I went, and I definitely understood what it was like having to fight for your space. There I was, 12 years old, desperately wanting to be in a gang. Thank goodness I grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh where there were none. Who knows what would’ve happened to me otherwise.