‘I want to take my story straight to Utopia’ : an interview with Gregory Norman Bossert

Abstract

Prolific and award-winning genre fiction short story writer Gregory Norman Bossert is in a unique position to chat expansively about the fraught subject of utopia. He is not only someone both well-versed and keenly cognisant of the history of speculative fiction—his “arcadian” fantasy story ‘The Telling’ won the World Fantasy Award in 2013—but he is also toiling, daily, to bring our most popular iterations of the dream worlds that these storytelling traditions evoke, and whose basic elements he considers crucial to depicting a utopian vision on the page. As a pre-visualisation/layout artist at Industrial Light & Magic, he has worked on projects like Rogue One, Tomorrowland, Avengers: Age of Ultron and many other “tentpole” blockbusters. He brings his crucial experience to bear while discussing the rich utopian tradition within science fiction, and wrings out the complications inherent in even starting to chart a utopian vision that is not in some way problematic or exclusionary