The Spring 2010 issue of The Paris Review contains an interview with Ray Bradbury that we all should have gotten a chance to read 30+ years ago. (That’s me and Ray below at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con International.)

Why has this interview gone unpublished until now? Because George Plimpton, editor of the magazine in the late 1970s, declared it to be “a bit informal in places, maybe overly enthusiastic.” Now that the transcribed interview has been rediscovered in Bradbury’s files, the magazine has rectified its error by talking further with Bradbury and bringing the piece up to date. (Which feels a bit odd; since the sections are undated, we have no idea when we’re reading 1970s’ Bradbury vs. 2010 Bradbury.)

As happy as I am to finally see the interview in print (and here’s a brief excerpt of it), it still irks me a bit to see the conversation organized, whether the exchange occurred that way originally or not, so that the magazine starts off by challenging Bradbury to defend his love of SF.

Here are the first two questions and answers:

Why do you write science fiction?

Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Imagine if sixty years ago, at the start of my writing career, I had thought to write a story about a woman who swallowed a pill and destroyed the Catholic Church, causing the advent of woman’s liberation. That story probably would have been laughed at, but it was within the realm of the possible and would have made great science fiction. If I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have written a story predicting the strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in a period of seventy years. Science fiction is not just the art of the possible, but of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

Does science fiction satisfy something that mainstream writing does not?

Yes, it does, because the mainstream hasn’t been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last fifty years. The major ideas of our time—developments in medicine, the importance of space exploration to advance our species—have been neglected. The critics are generally wrong, or they’re fifteen, twenty years late. It’s a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery.

The interview continues on like that for a few more questions, getting into Vonnegut’s break from the SF ghetto, and so on.

So while it’s good to see that The Paris Review isn’t as close-minded as it was when George Plimpton was running it, it doesn’t seem as if they’ve loosened up quite far enough. Would they have started off an interview with John Irving, let’s say, by asking him whether mainstream writing satisfies something that science fiction does not?

And BTW—you’re hearing this from a lifetime subscriber to The Paris Review, so don’t take this as another one of those rants that haters of The New Yorker and other literary magazines often fall prey to.