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9.
AOTW: Have you ever found your works to be prophetic? In your genre do you think it's possible to foreshadow the future? Is this possibility ever lurking in the back of your mind while writing?
Mark L. Williams: Well, shoot, the Danger Boy books have a biological weapons subplot lurking in them that I thought wouldn't be part of "reality" for a few more years yet. Then there's the bit about changing weather and freak storms: I had a snowstorm in New Orleans when the first book was coming out, and snow was really falling there...
Meredith Ann Pierce: I think science fiction tends to be far more prophetic than fantasy. Since science fiction most often deals with hypothetical futures, this makes perfect sense. I see fantasy as more timeless, mythic, taking place in the endless dreamtime that is our own unconscious: the past that is ever present, the emotional truths that never wane. When I am writing, I have no awareness of the real world. I'm completely captivated by the world I am creating. I'm thinking only of the story.
Patrice Kindl: Hee, hee. That's pretty funny. No. Well, that's only my own work. Earlier I mentioned books which blend sci-fi and fantasy. These might prove prophetic, I suppose.
Sherwood Smith: Well, I have found that predicting certain kinds of human behavior does indeed come to be true.
Nancy Springer: Good heavens, it's hard enough just to write a good story without worrying about being some kind of a seer. No, in my experience, real life is so out-there that fiction is unlikely to foreshadow it. Or at least, not published fiction. If anyone had written a book foreshadowing AIDS, for instance, they would have been told it was too improbable. Or what happened this past September 11? Forget it. Nobody would have believed it.
Tamora Pierce: No, thank heavens. All my prophets tend to be easily confused (too much input, too many parallel universes). The closest I have ever gotten is all those years that I've explained to audiences that the reason there is no Big Bad Guy in the Circle of Magic quartet is because I wanted my four heroes to deal with the things that kids living in our time experience: earthquakes, forest fires, epidemics, and even in most parts of the world pirates and bandits. I'd tell them that, particularly with regard to the pirates/bandits and epidemic disease, we in America have been living in a protective bubble for 50 - 60 years, safe from the perils which threaten most of the rest of the world. This particular speech came around to bite me on the behind on September 11th, when I realized that the same bubble, which had also shielded us from the kind of experience that occurs from Belfast to East Timor, was now shattered. Frankly, I wouldn't have minded continuing to stay in the bubble for another couple of decades.
Carol Hughes: Hell no. Absolutely not.
Nancy Farmer: People have been foreshadowing the future since the days of Jeremiah. I don't want to do this. I try to plug into the zeitgeist of the age.
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