Book Review: Conversations from the Edge: The Galaxy’s Edge Interviews by Joy Ward

This review was first published by Booklist on June 14, 2019.

Galaxy’s Edge, a monthly sf and fantasy magazine edited by Mike Resnick, has been publishing interviews with prominent figures from the sf and fantasy fields since 2014, all conducted by Joy Ward. Conversations from the Edge collects 25 of these interviews into a single volume, in what will hopefully be the first of many such collections. The interviews are an impressive who’s who: George R. R. Martin, David Brin, Connie Willis, Larry Niven, Lois McMaster Bujold, David Drake, Greg Bear, and many more. Some interviews are presented as they originally appeared in the magazine, and some are expanded. They’re remarkable for their candidness: Ward has a talent for encouraging her subjects to speak deeply and at length, with honesty and candor. The interviewees speak about such topics as their personal history, their writing process, where they find inspiration, where they see the genres headed, even how they define sf and fantasy (there’s not as much agreement about this as one might think). This book is a treasure for fans and historians of sf.