This Labor Day, Sci-Fi Crush had the opportunity to interview Hugo Award-winning novelist C.J. Cherryh.  Since 1975, she has written over sixty books in the science fiction and fantasy genres.  Here, we briefly discuss her successful career and how today’s beginning writers can follow her example.

From reading your website, fans can see that you have a huge variety of interests, like genealogy and archaeology, as well as exciting life experiences.  How do these interests and experiences play a role in inspiring your work?

It’s a good thing for a writer to be curious. One of the least useful things to take (for me, being a Latin major) was English. I know grammar.  And a good writing teacher who’s teaching writing instead or in addition to writing is amazingly rare. So if you’re on tour and the guide wants to know who wants to ride the camel, you volunteer. You never stay in the hotel when your traveling partner is going to look at cathedrals. You get up and go.  You just never know what you’ll need.

It seems that one of the universal traits of successful writers is perseverance.  Could you talk a bit about your own experiences in battling through rejection and any advice you’d have for young writers striving to break in?

Any time you can look at something on the stands and say, “I can do better than that,” set that book on a shelf and read a passage any time you feel down. Luck and persistence means that after every single other would-be writer has thrown in the towel, you’re still there with a manuscript.  Nothing sells in a drawer. Always have something submitted.

In contrast, the publication of Gate of Ivrel in 1976 must have been a huge moment in your life.  What was that feeling like?  Did it give you more confidence as a writer?

Ha. Everyone I could have told was out of town. For a week. I remodeled my office with my modest check, and when next the family visited, I said, matter of factly, when they marveled at the office (furnished a la Sears): “Oh, I sold a novel.”

You’ve created several worlds, including the Alliance-Union universe and the Foreigner universe.  What do you enjoy most about jumping from one universe to the other?  Is there anything you dislike about it? 

Don’t get me started. Now that the distributors (looking mostly for tie-ins) dictate what does and doesn’t get to the stores, you’ll start a world with a premise, and then your poor editor has to say no to the next one. So you keep leaving pieces of your soul behind in limbo and trying yet again. I felt sorry for Roger Zelazny, whose Dilvish the Damned got caught in a publisher mess, and didn’t foresee that the new age of publishing would do that to all of us, over and over and over.

So many movies these days are adaptations, either of novels, comic books, old television shows, or classic movies.  Have any producers approached you about adapting your work into a movie franchise or television show?

Now and again. Even currently. But since most movies are really a short story and I’m not a short story writer, that sort of is a problem. A movie can’t handle multiple plot lines.

You’re known for creating such original worlds, which makes Lois & Clark: A Superman Novel such a rarity since you were contributing to the DC Comics Universe, which dozens of writers had been developing since 1938.  How did you feel about writing famous characters as Superman and Lois Lane?

I did it because they offered me the chance to ’set the character of Lois Lane for the modern age.’ And since myth is something I know from Classics, I view this as kind of a modern myth, and was interested to work with it.

In 2001, Don Wells and Alex Cruz named an asteroid, the 77185 Cherryh, in your honor.  How did that make you feel?  Did you meet (or already know) Wells and Cruz?

I don’t know them, but I was extremely honored. I kept having real-world computer problems, so it took me forever to get back to them on it, but I am delighted. I just hope it keeps its distance from Earth. I’d hate to become notorious.

What are some of your new projects that fans should look forward to?

I’m gathering up my backlist, fending off the pirates, and issuing my own legitimate e-books under the Closed Circle label, along with Jane Fancher and Lynn Abbey.

Is there anything you’d like future pioneers of science fiction and fantasy to explore further?

Whatever’s on the horizon. And do it optimistically. Anybody can whine about impending doom. SF writers are supposed to think their way through problems—the literature of ideas, after all.