In an interview with Annie Proulx in the Spring 2009 issue of The Paris Review, the author of “Brokeback Mountain” and The Shipping News is asked to name her influences.

Here’s how she responds:

I can’t answer that question. I have been an omnivorous reader since early childhood and I suppose the work of all the writers I’ve read has flowed through my brain, and that some of it stuck. S.J. Perelman, Nordhoff and Hall, Kinnan Rawlings, Jack London, Faulkner, Hemingway, Dante, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, lots of science fiction, Vardis Fisher, Graham Greene, Jaroslav Hasek … why go on? Almost every book I’ve read has left its mark. And I think it silly to look for influences.

As much as I admire Proulx, I have to say this ticked me off.

Non-SF authors get named, but any SF writers she might have read get lumped together as “lots of science fiction”? Yeah, that sci-fi stuff is indistinguishable. Octavia Butler and Robert Heinlein? Can’t tell them apart!

I’d like to have learned the names of the specific writers. But no.

Sigh …

Am I overreacting yet again? I think not, but then, that’s what you’re all here to let me know.