Originality: Feh, Who Needs It?

RS Benedict talks to Stephen Mazur, Assistant Editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, about originality. How important is it, really? Readers and editors say they crave original stories, but much of our pop culture these days is proudly derivative: sequels, remakes, reboots and adaptations of pre-existing source material. And the human race has been telling stories for millennia; chances are, someone else has already had a story idea just like yours. Should we even bother trying to tell original stories? Does originality matter?

Recommended reading:

• The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
• Kali Wallace’s “Botanical Exercises for Curious Girls” (FSF March 2011)
• Cassandra Khaw and Jonathan L. Howard, “Shooting Iron” (FSF Sept/Oct 2018)
• GV Anderson, “I Am Not I” (FSF July/Aug 2017)
• Interview with Wole Talabi on “The Harmonic Resonance of Ejiro Anaborhi”
• Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series. (In general you should definitely be reading Ursula Le Guin!)
• That time Caresse Crosby, the inventor of the brassiere, ghost-wrote smut for Henry Miller
• Interview with Ken Liu on “Arc”
• Go Forth and Multiply: Twelve Tales of Repopulation
• Correction: While many of Philip K. Dick’s books came out as paperback originals, these titles were published first in hardback: Time Out of Joint, The Man in the High Castle, Now Wait for Last Year, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, A Scanner Darkly, The Divine Invasion, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

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