Back in August, Louisa Egbunike caught up with award-winning SFF author Wole Talabi to chat about his work. This interview was first published in Vector 289.

Earlier you mentioned feeling like you were outside of literary circles, and being dragged in. By who? Who’s dragging you?

I don’t know. For a long time, my writing was just about blogging, writing stories from random ideas, and selling to these obscure science fiction magazines. Well, not obscure … but still, I never had any sense of belonging to a generation of writers, you know? The “it” people, or should I say “lit” people right now, are all people I hadn’t met before, hadn’t heard of, and probably hadn’t read much of. Until maybe last year, when I started meeting them after the whole Caine Prize nomination.

So I guess maybe the Caine Prize dragged me into the whole literary circle thing. Before that, I was just like, “I have an interesting idea, there’s some cool robots, and what if the world was like this? Okay, that’s it.” Now, it’s like I have actual fans, and other writers are saying, “There’s all these layers, meanings, and themes in your work.” I was like, “Okay, cool. I mostly thought the robot was cool, but that’s it.”

They see things in your work you didn’t see yourself?

It’s not like I ignore themes or whatever. It’s just, for me, they’re kind of secondary – which is almost the opposite of most writers I know. Most writers I know focus on character and theme. But for me, the idea comes first, and everything else is secondary. A lot of my stories come from just studying things. I see some interesting science thing, and I’m like, “Oh, OK. How would that really work?”

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