UC San Diego has had the good fortune to have seven major figures in sf, fantasy and horror attend the University.  One of those was Suzette Haden Elgin, founder of the Science Fiction Poetry Association and a 1971 Linguistics Ph.D.  In the first of what we plan as a series, we interviewed Suzette by email and have posted the exchange on our new Interview Page.

Suzette, then a 32-year-old mother of four whose sf stories helped pay her way through the program, discusses the ongoing importance of linguistics to her writing over her career; the ways in which the speed of change in the ‘Real World’ makes it harder to keep sf ahead of reality; and the similarities between fantasy writing, anthropology and linguistics.

Suzette’s time at UCSD overlapped with that of Greg Benford (1967 Physics Ph.D.) and especially Vernor Vinge (1971 Mathematics Ph.D.).  The three never met, she tells us.  Wouldn’t that make a wonderful sf story, an imagined meeting on campus of three so very different writers, a la Tom Stoppard’s Travesties?