About our guest, Bruce Taylor:
Bruce Taylor, also know as “Mr. Magic Realism,” was a student at the Clarion West Science Fiction/Fantasy, and has been actively promoting and advancing the form of writing known as Magical Realism, founding the Magic Realist Writers International Network in 2001. He has currently co-edited, along with Elton Elliott (former editor of the Science Fiction Review), the anthology Like Water for Quarks: The Intersection of Magic Realism and Science Fiction.
Discussed:
- Magical Realism as a literary form of lucid dreaming
- Examples of stories in this genre:
- An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce; Finding Willoughby; One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.)
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies
by Laura Esquivel;
- How Magical Realism combines cultures, such as European and South American.
- How do you combine the magical without throwing people out of the story?
- How the use of metaphor can convey what words can’t, and how Magical Realism uses that in story.
- How South America/European clash was the perfect place to create Magical Realism.
- How the advances in modern quantum physics create a perfect time to explore Magical Realism. (17:45)
- Story ideas a plenty!
- “As quantum physics and magical realism have developed and drawn closer together, it is like a singularity that only magical realism and quantum physics can appreciate how strange things truly are.” ~20 min
- Tim reviewed Like Water for Quarks
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Timothy C. Ward
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I thoroughly enjoyed this interview, Tim. I love magic realism – in fact, one of my own short stories, Levitation, which appeared in an anthology called Shorts V, was magic realism – by accident, rather than design. It started as an out and out horror story, but then I re-wrote it, and it was selected for this competition anthology.
In terms of works worth looking out for, I’d like to mention House of the Spirits – and indeed other novels by the wonderful Isabel Allende; the original Russian version of Solaris, directed by Andrej Tarkovsky (the US version was quite good, but the Tarkovsky is a real work of art); arguably 2001: A Space Odyssey is magic realism, too. And check out The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror athologies (St. Martin’s Press) – they always have a number of magical realist stories in there.