Ibn Qirtaiba Interview - Greg Egan

"IQ: To begin with, a question about each of your published novels. First comes An Unusual Angle. You are no longer especially fond of this novel, although hints of your future direction can be found in it (for instance you revisit the idea of a movie camera implanted in a character's body in your latest novel Distress). The novel's protagonist shows a notable propensity for scientific metaphor (there are references to wave functions, energy states, parsecs and mass spectrometers) and he seems to be a science fiction fan to boot (with references to Daleks, 2001, Star Wars, Altered States and Mad Max II). He also shares the interest in film-making you held at his age. To what extent is the novel autobiographical?

GE: I wrote An Unusual Angle when I was in high school, and basically I just applied a slight SF/surrealist distortion to my own situation at the time. The whole book is really the extended daydream of a bored schoolkid staring out the window and constructing a layer of fantasy to superimpose over everything, but the daydream's always anchored by the fact that the reality's still there. Shades of Billy Liar and Walter Mitty, I suppose. It's autobiographical to the extent that the basic circumstances and attitude of the narrator were pretty much my own, and I think it does capture a certain way of responding to tedium and petty authority, which is what most novels of school life are ultimately about. But for a book-length daydream to work, it would either have to be a lot more structured, or a lot more inventive, than this."


http://web.archive.org/web/20050101091605/http://sf.sig.au.mensa.org/iq-18.html