Susanna, your book is striking for its use of a kind of voice that is like the signature of the Enlightenment. It's the voice of reason that you have very common-sensically describing all these dreamlike things. It's really a voice that belongs to the birth of the novel. It's the root voice of novels.

S.C.: That's true, but I can't say it's in any way deliberate. It's funny, because I don't think of myself as a novelist. I think of myself as a writer. I tell stories. I kind of stumbled on that by trying to combine Jane Austen and magic.

N.G.: But even at the beginning of the Enlightenment, you've also got Isaac Newton, who was on one hand figuring out gravity and the motion of planets and also spending much of the rest of the time on alchemy and magic. Also, he was famously the man who built two cat flaps: one for the cat and one for the kittens, which I love.

S.C.: That was Newton?

N.G.: Whether he did it or not, I don't know, but he is reputed to have. It's a John Aubrey legend. Newton was out there on the edges of science when nobody knew what the rules were. The joy of "Strange & Norrell" is that you have practical practicing magicians. One of the reasons science-fiction people liked that book was that it could easily have been about a lost science.

S.C.: You get there, to the rational voice, by having everyone argue with everyone else. If you assume magic existing as a technology, then obviously, as with any other body of knowledge, there will be hugely differing views. Once you have them all arguing about it with each other, it sounds very rational.

N.G.: All you have to do is spend any time around any scientists or academics to discover that they all disagree with each other and believe that their way of doing it is the only right and true way and that nobody else knows anything.

Both of you have very distinctive approaches to writing fiction with fantastic elements, so much so that I almost hesitate to call it fantasy, because by now the term is one many people associate with faux-medieval epics.

N.G.: It's a big word. I like to use "fantasy" to include everything else, too.

You mean conventional realism?

N.G.: Yes, because you're still making it up. Unless you're writing about actual real people who really do exist and what they do day to day and then do not decide which bits you'll emphasize, that could be realism. I mean, if you're running webcams and just writing up everything, that might be realism, but anything else ...

What about all the association with all those Tolkien imitators?

N.G.: That's so recent. One of the things I tried to do in "Stardust," and Susanna did do in "Strange & Norrell," is write a book for which there's an absolutely solid tradition in English literature, but it predates the idea that there was a part of the bookstore marked "Fantasy." When Tolkien published "The Lord of the Rings," those were books, published as books. There weren't "Fantasy" shelves because there was no genre.

S.C.: The fantasy we're both writing is drawing not just on the things that came after Tolkien, but on the whole of these things that came before. We're most interested in the things that came before the genre -- that's really it.

N.G.: Once people realized there was a genre, they started "doing" other people, doing Tolkien. They became faint photocopies. You get these great big books which are set in a medieval kingdom that is basically somebody's impression of what they liked about Tolkien, combined with what they enjoyed about playing Dungeons and Dragons as a high schooler. That's not what we're doing.

Still, you wind up being lumped with it because of the genre label.

N.G.: I don't know that there's any way around that besides market forces. I read a review yesterday in Bust magazine, which I'd picked up in a supermarket. I used to quite like it, but it looked like it had been bought by somebody and completely overhauled. They had some reviews in the back, and I said, "Oh look, here's a review of Kelly Link's new book. I wonder what they say." And what they said was that the book was really horrible because it was filled with things that were made up, zombies and things and a handbag with a world in it, and how could this possible relate to anybody's life? It was basically a review written by someone who could cope with neither similes nor metaphors.

Are either of us fantasy writers? I don't think so; we're both writers. But we make things up, and I like the privilege of being allowed to make anything up.

S.C.: It's about imagination. Jay McInerney did this interesting response in the Guardian newspaper to V.S. Naipaul saying that fiction is dead. It was quite good as far as it went. But there's this assumption in what he said that what you're writing about is the world now and that the important thing is to examine the world now. I kind of think, Why? Shakespeare didn't think it was important to write contemporary Elizabethan plays. Dickens tended to write about the society 50 or 20 years earlier. It seems to me that what writers are supposed to do is use their imaginations. Imagination is one of the most important things we have.

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