It is not every day that a dream comes true, and even more seldom you can nail down the specific moment it happens. For me, it was the afternoon of December 5, 1992 when a group of four Atlanta and Athens area writers sat down in a big studio with me.

I have a background in radio that begins before I was born. My father was a disk jockey in the small town of Superior Nebraska when he was in high school, working nights and weekends after school. As an adult he was a salesman and air personality at a local AM station in Kansas. I later worked at the same station as a DJ nights and weekends when I was in high school. It was in my pedigree. I continued to work in radio in college, at WREK 91.1 FM, the Georgia Tech campus radio station. I did many odd jobs, from being the voice introducing Stardate to being one of the automated announcers heard at 3 AM behind some weird screechy Laibach track. For many years, my high water mark was the comedy show I did at noon every Saturday. It was actually pretty popular, partly because I was on a constant quest to try to air the dirtiest comedy possible. I aired George Carlin and Richard Pryor bits, with the minimal edits I thought I could do and avoid getting fired. I tried every technique for taking out the actual cursing itself while still making it completely self-evident what the missing words were. I spent a lot of time sitting in front of a reel-to-reel console with a razor blade and magic marker, physically slicing out dirty words. I had a tape with all the removed words strung together, which was one of the funniest things I've ever heard in my life.

All of this was fun, but in the back of my head I had a dream. What I really wanted to be doing was an interview show. A large chunk of my time since early adolescence was spent reading science fiction and comic books. I had done some interview work for fanzines as a nerdy fanboy in Augusta Georgia. The highpoint was an interview with Dave Sim, the writer-artist of Cerebus. I was convinced interviewing SF and comics writers would make good radio. Like the elephant tied by a piece of yarn, the only thing that really prevented me from pursuing the dream was me. I lacked the confidence to cold call publicists and tell them what I wanted, to ask strangers for favors, to make bizarre requests of nice people—all things that radio producers do every day. My fear was that I wouldn't be able to get enough writers to talk to me to keep such a show going. Such was my naivete that I really thought that would be a problem. I didn't know then that most SF writers are dying for outlets to talk about their work, and that there are hundreds out there waiting to be asked.

Fast forward a few years to 1992. After graduation, I took a job as a quality control chemist with Merck in Albany Georgia. It paid the bills, but left the soul unsatisfied. I began to pursue the interview show idea again. Mainly, I wanted to succeed or fail having actually tried to do it. This was the birth of a bit of wisdom I now live by—that it is far better to fail honestly than regret never trying. By actually talking to writers, I discovered they almost all were happy to do the show. When I found out how easy it really was, I kicked myself for not doing this years earlier. Over the course of the show, my success rate was something like 1 declination for every 50 acceptances. I found myself coming home to answering machine messages from writers I had long admired. Every fanboy loves that.

That fateful day in the studio, December 5, 1992, the guests were Brad Strickland, Tom Deitz, Poppy Z. Brite and Nicola Griffith. It was thrilling because what I had wanted for so long was actually happening. It was miserable, because practically everything that could go wrong did. My plan was to have all four writers come in, tape an episode for air later, and then do a live roundtable with all of them. However, there were technical disasters galore, one after another. The microphones didn't work right, the mixing board had problems, the audio would drop in and out. My plan fell apart when I realized that the only thing these folks had to do to keep themselves occupied was to sit there and listen to the other interviews happen. This meant that every interview had an audience of all the other guests, which terrified me! At one point, I was so frazzled and stressed by this nightmare of my own creation that I almost ran out into the hall to cry. At this darkest moment, Nicola Griffith leaned over to rub my arm and tell me everything would be all right. This was the moment that things started to turn around. Prior to that, my perception was that she thought I was an idiot. Hell, prior to that, my perception of myself was that I was an idiot. With her encouragement and that of my wife, I sucked it up and soldiered forward. The day was salvaged, all four interviews were taped, and the live show went on. Instead of airing for a full hour like planned, it started half an hour late and only went for half an hour. At that point, I was glad to have anything. I did a monologue to start the live show which turned out so terrible that I still try to forget it ever happened. When the ON AIR lights went out at 6 PM that day and it was over, I was filled with the most amazing sense of relief. I had made it out alive, scarred but smarter.

This wouldn't be the last terrible day, nor the last glorious triumph. It's amazing how often those two things are tied very closely together in time. After this bittersweet first experience, I was hooked. I would go on to produce over 200 episodes of this radio show, first for WREK and then later for national syndication on the NPR satellite system. I got help from friends and family, particularly my wife, Darlene, but essentially the entire run of the show was produced by only myself. The show ended as a new production in October 1998, a few months shy of six years after it started. I had the privilege and pleasure of interviewing a vast number of writers of fantasy, science fiction, horror, comic books, and mysteries. Some of these were “big name” types; many were not. However, I'm proud of each and every one of these interviews. I owe a great debt to everyone trusting and foolish enough to waste an hour talking to me.

What you are reading now is my attempt to take this body of work to a new medium and a new form of interaction. From the production of the radio show, I have hundreds of hours of taped interviews with authors of speculative fiction. This is work I want to keep alive and available to those discerning readers who have an interest in the machinery that creates these works of fiction. At the same time, revolutions in the Internet and eBooks are making it ever easier to publish. This is an experiment, not unlike the experiment that brought four writers to a studio in Atlanta seven years ago. It will probably have much the same results—a lot of mistakes, some failures, some successes and, ultimately, a legacy of which I am proud.

This is the first of these eBooks, and is free now and forever. It is also freely distributable, so if you enjoy any of these interviews, pass it along to your friends with my blessing. Following this volume will be others, which will not be free. They will, however, all be modestly priced—not unlike what you'd expect to pay for your typical magazine of its kind. My goal is to achieve the best of all possible worlds here by publishing a book's worth of material, charging a magazine's price, and making it available electronically so that anyone who wants it can get it nearly instantaneously. These words might seem quaint in the future when most books are electronic, but at the time of this writing it is still very much in its infancy.

I will happily accept any and all feedback from readers. Feel free to e-mail me at dave_slusher@sff.net and tell me what you think. For now, that's enough rambling from me. Enjoy the rest of the book, and remember that whenever the details of life threaten to overwhelm you, that's time for a Reality Break.

Dave Slusher

November 1999

Nicola Griffith—December 1992
+ Introduction
+ Interview
Poppy Z. Brite—October 1993
+ Introduction
+ Interview
Michael Swanwick—January 1994
+ Introduction
+ Interview
Kim Stanley Robinson—March 1994
+ Introduction
+ Interview
Emma Bull—April 1994
+ Introduction
+ Interview
James Morrow—April 1994
+ Introduction
+ Interview
Michael Bishop—April 1994
+ Introduction
+ Interview
Ann Kennedy and Chris Reed—May 1994
+ Introduction
+ Interview
Tad Williams—June 1994
+ Introduction
+ Interview
Jonathan Lethem—October 1996
+ Introduction
+ Interview

This eBook was originally prepared using the IPress system, developed by Infinite Ink. That technology is now owned by InterTrust Technologies (http://www.intertrust.com). This book has since been additionally formatted for PDF.

Each section of this book consists of 3 parts: an introduction to the interview, the interview itself, and a reference section. The reference section contains web links where appropriate and limited bibliographies. All the books in this section have hyperlinks. If the book is in print at the time this document is being prepared, it will link to that book's page on Amazon.com. Should the book be out of print, it will link to an ISBN number search at Powells.com. This search may or may not turn up copies, depending on Powell's stock at the time.

This book is the first of a series. Future volumes will be available periodically. More information about this series of books is available at http://www.evilgeniuscorp.com/egep/realitybreak/.

Dave Slusher, dave_slusher@sff.net

October, 2000

This book is the first of a series. Volume One slated for release in March 2000. More information about this series of books is available at http://www.evilgeniuscorp.com/egep/realitybreak/.

Dave Slusher, dave_slusher@sff.net

October, 2000

Version 1.00, November 1999.

Initial revision.

Version 1.01, November 1999.

Added copyright notice.

Version 1.02, November 1999.

Fixed a typo on Michael Bishop's interview and several in Michael Swanwick's.

Version 1.03, October 2000.

Updated docs in the “About Section", including copyright notices in order to include the PDF version of the document. Adjusted documents for PDF formatting, and changed the optimistic date predictions that have since passed.

Michael Bishop was the very first person to agree to be a guest on the Reality Break radio show, so it is only fitting that his be the first interview in the first book.

At the World Fantasy Convention in Pine Mountain, Georgia in 1992, I showed up armed with two page flyers describing a show I wanted to do and a stack of business cards. When I approached Michael Bishop, it seemed to be an act of brazen chutzpah—a voice in my head suggested me that I not bother the man. I handed him a flyer and gave him my spiel about the proposed show. He responded with an enthusiastic “Yes” and proceeded to write down his address and phone number for me. For the next month, I kept thinking “Good Lord, Michael Bishop's home number is in my day planner!” It was my first moment of being starstruck, that a writer whose work I so admired was now accessible to me.

As it turned out, it would be a year and a half before the actual interview in April 1994. Brittle Innings had just been released, and we did the interview just a few days after the 20th anniversary of Hank Aaron's 715th home run. It seemed a fitting time and place to discuss that novel. To this day, Brittle Innings remains one of my favorite novels that I read for the show. In fact, it is one of my favorite novels ever.

I was delighted to do this interview, but I sure was unprepared. I always feel nervous and unprepared in the moments before I do one, but this time I really was. I found it impossible to remember the title The Secret Ascension (or alternately Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas,) I asked some really half-assed questions and in general got a little flustered at myself. Despite all that, the interview turned out well. This had far more to do with him than me. He soldiered on, politely giving intelligent answers to stupid questions, and we ended up with something good. To this day, I feel like I owe him a shot at another, more intelligent interview.

This interview was conducted in April 1994 via telephone with Michael at his home in Pine Mountain, Georgia.

DS: It's been some time. You were the very first person to agree to appear on the show. We're glad you were able to finally be on with us.

MB: It took me a while to get on, though, didn't it?

DS: Something like a year and a half but we're glad to have you here. Your new book is Brittle Innings out from Bantam Books. Tell us a little about the book.

MB: The book originated primarily from two different directions, I guess. Two of my interests are baseball and literature. I tried to combine those two interests in a novel by taking a look back at a very famous novel by Mary Shelley and trying to yoke that in some convincing way with my interest in baseball. I tried to create a mythical minor league called the Chattahoochee Valley League which is a minor league that exists during World War Two—at least in my own mind, in Alabama and Georgia with four teams in each state. I knew that during World War Two the ball players who remained stateside playing the game were for the most part—I don't want to use the word misfits, because not all of them were misfits but they were certainly very young or very old or they had physical handicaps, anything that would keep them out of the war. As a consequence, you could have a team that consisted of really motley assemblages of players. I felt like that was an interesting group of people to look at and to use as characters in a novel. It also seemed to me that you could come up with some very interesting characters on the ball club and that was one of the things that prompted this particular book. I don't know what else to say at this point, except that the story covers an entire season, the 1943 season in the Chattahoochee Valley League. The main character is Danny Boles, a 17 year old shortstop who comes south from Tenkiller, Oklahoma. He finds himself rooming in the boardinghouse that is owned by the manager, and he requires all the unmarried players to live in this boardinghouse. Danny Boles finds himself rooming with a rather interesting character, and that's another major part of the story.

DS: You've touched on the disparate elements that make up this book. Did you find it hard to mesh together some radically different ideas?

MB: I've always worked on the premise that science fiction and fantasy writers, in particular, try to bring together disparate elements and shape something meaningful and maybe even shapely out of those elements. That was one of the things I was attempting to do. I do think it was a difficult task, but at that same time I feel extraordinarily good about this particular book because I think for the most part I bring it off. I don't always feel that way about everything that I attempt, but in this book the elements seemed to mesh. It took a little bit of effort, certainly. It was fun, a very entertaining book to write, even the parts that were difficult to figure out. It was fun figuring out how to do them.

DS: I'm guessing that it's not a coincidence that the book is coming out at the beginning of baseball season.

MB: It's no coincidence at all. I had nothing to say about when the book would be out. In fact, I probably would have wished that it had come out a little sooner. It may be that Bantam was wiser than I in that because the book is being reviewed along with other baseball books. Many are published at this time of year simply because the baseball season is starting and there are a great many book pages across the country that will devote sections to baseball books. As a matter of fact, the Atlanta Journal/Constitution today reviewed Brittle Innings on a page with reviews of three other baseball books. That's good. It brings attention to the book and focuses those readers who are interested in the sport would certainly be looking for it at this time of year.

DS: Do you think that baseball more than most sports is more easily susceptible to fantastic elements, such as in Shoeless Joe / Field of Dreams and stories along that line?

MB: I'm not sure. I think that there is something kind of mythical about baseball itself. It's so much a part of the American character that I think it engenders tall tales of one sort or another. Baseballs that are hit that supposedly never come down, baseballs that land on freight trains and are carried off to some other state and become the longest home run ever ht. It just seems to me that there is just something in the American character that resonates to the idea of baseball. It's a part of us. Tall tales and myths arise out of it. I think that's one of the reasons that many writers are attracted to it. Football is a great sport, basketball is a great sport. I like both of them, but I can't see myself writing a novel about either one of them. Good novels, I'm sure, have been written about both. Baseball, on the other hand, there is just something incredibly rich about it.

DS: Is the book being marketed more as a mainstream book than some of your others have been?

MB: It's the first time in my career that a book has been marketed as a mainstream novel. Nowhere on the cover or in the jacket copy will you find fantasy or science fiction. It's presented pretty much as a mainstream book. I don't think this is misleading, because the jacket copy does explain that the story has an odd element to it. It is being marketed as mainstream. I don't know how this is going to work. I hope that it works well. I'm very proud of this particular book.

DS: You've been very successful over the course of your career writing in SF and fantasy genres. Has your success in those genres in some cases closed doors that may have been open to you—or, at least, made it a little harder to get books into the hands of people who may enjoy them but don't regularly read those genres?

MB: I think that's true. I'm not knocking the genres themselves at all, but I do think that certain expectations arise from both the editors and the readers. If they know you primarily as a science fiction and fantasy writer that's the little pigeonhole that they mentally place you in—perhaps without in any way intending to disparage your talent. Nevertheless, putting you in a pigeonhole that might deprive some people that might ordinarily like what you have done of the chance to read you. I agree with that. It's unfortunate in some respects, in other respects I have to say that I owe my career to these fields. They were very receptive to me in the beginning when I was starting—more so than the mainstream markets. It may be that I might not have been writing as long as I have been had it not been for the fantasy and SF fields. I do think that there is a terrible tendency to suppose that a person who works in these fields can't do anything else.

DS: In many cases, writers will have a different persona for each pigeonhole they want to write in. Was there any trepidation about using your own name?

MB: No, not really. [laughs] I have some small reputation in the science fiction field, but almost none outside of it. Presenting this book under the name “Michael Bishop” is almost like presenting a first novel to many people, like a writer they've never experienced before but might find interesting. I never thought about using a pseudonym on it, and certainly my publisher didn't either. Had I been a bigger name in the science fiction field than I am, somebody might have thought of that. On the other hand, if I were a really big name they probably would have thought it didn't matter. I hope at this stage that people like this book enough that maybe they'll look back at some of the earlier works.

DS: You were not born in this part of the country, but you've spent about the last 20 or 25 years living around this area.

MB: I tell people very often that I'm a militant transplanted Southerner. I've lived here so long now that I feel like this indeed my region. I feel very comfortable here, like I've assimilated by osmosis some of the cultural characteristics and the way that people operate here, the way that people think. I think that it's an incredibly rich area. That was another thing that was very important to me in doing Brittle Innings—setting the book in the south, in Georgia, the deep south during WW II and being able to draw on that aspect of American culture, as well as baseball. That was tremendous and I loved it.

DS: You've written about this area earlier in Catacomb Years, about Atlanta as sort of an archetypal city. Does the city of Atlanta present special possibilities for you as a writer?

MB: I think it presents special possibilities for anyone who is familiar with the city. I think an even more characteristic novel that deals with Atlanta was Ancient of Days which came out in 1985 and looks at Atlanta in the mid-eighties, really. The book is set at the same time it was published, and it was an attempt to recreate imaginatively what Atlanta is like. It was an attempt on my part to draw on something that I knew a little about. Even though I've never lived in Atlanta proper I've certainly been up there a lot and feel comfortable there.

DS: In your book you have a wide variety of dialects and various tones that the book is written in. Do you find it hard to present all of these different speech patterns that are similar, but each has their own qualities?

MB: It was a very deliberate attempt on my part to get them all right, or at least as right as possible. I know that if you look at Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn at the beginning he talks about the different dialects in the book and he warns readers not to think that the characters are all trying to talk alike and not quite succeeding. That's the way I feel about Brittle Innings. I do try very hard to make the individual dialects of the characters distinguishable and accurate. That was a hard thing to do. How well I've pulled it off is not for me to say, of course, but the effort was there.

DS: You had the portions of the book that were presented as the diary of the character of Henry Clerval—written in sort of a deliberate 19th century style. You jumped back and forth. Did you use that as a counterpoint to the style of the rest of the book?

MB: I was hoping that readers would notice that there was a great deal of difference between the way Danny Boles presents his narrative, and he's looking back on these events from the age of 65 on things that happened when he was 17. He speaks in a rather Midwestern Oklahoma accent. The Clerval character uses the 19th century British approach. The contrast between the two is one of the things that gives the book some of its flavor. Also, it was a stylistic challenge and I enjoyed that. I wanted to see if I could pull that off as well.

DS: Set as it was in this time and this place, it touched on some very tricky racial issues that were happening at this point in the history of the region. By bringing in the character of Henry who is so different from every character around him, did that give you an outside perspective to bring to the events?

MB: I think so. That was one of the ideas that I had in the back of my mind. There is one chapter where he and Danny go to a black theater in LaGrange, Georgia and actually attend the movie with a black audience. For the most part, before they go in, Henry identifies with the black audience because he knows what it is like to be discriminated against, he has some understanding about how they feel. Yet, at the same time, he finds that its very uncomfortable for him as the films that they happen to be watching progress. More as a consequence of the nature of the films than any real antipathy on the part of the audience. There was certainly that thought in the back of my mind that Henry would provide a new perspective on the whole question.

DS: You have the character of Darius who went on to play in the Negro League. You did a lot of research into the research into the Negro League?

MB: I'm not any kind of expert on it, but I delved into a number of books and magazine articles on the subject. One book that was particularly helpful and I wish I could remember the title now dealt almost entirely with the Kansas City Monarchs. Their schedules and how they would play split seasons and had to restrict their travel because of wartime gas rationing. It was difficult for them to put together any type of meaningful season, but they still managed to do it, despite the restrictions and despite the prejudice and despite the odds against them. That was another aspect of American culture at the time that became a very rich source of material for the book.

DS: You touched several times on the fact that many of the greatest players of the time were prohibited from getting the glory and the acclaim that they would have deserved in a later time.

MB: Absolutely. Nobody disputes that now. One of the things that has happened over the last few years is that black ballplayers from that era are now being recognized and admitted to the Hall of Fame. It's a minor thing to do in some respects but it has great symbolic significance and its an attempt to rectify a wrong that can never really be rectified.

DS: Even as we speak, this is the anniversary of Henry Aaron breaking Babe Ruth's career home run record. As you say, many players are getting their acclaim retroactively.

MB: Some of them were absolutely wonderful players. Cool Papa Bell, Satchel Paige, many others.

DS: Let's talk a little about some of your other work. In addition to your novel and prose work you also write some poetry. Does that affect your prose style?

MB: I must confess that it's been a while since I've written much poetry, largely because as a full-time freelance writer I'm trying to support myself and my family through my writing and poetry just doesn't make any writer very much money. You have to do it completely for love, and if you don't do it for love there's not much reason to do it. I think that the one thing that poetry does is that it concentrates your attention on your level of diction and exactly the right word choice. If you are writing poetry that you hope is any good at all, you have to be conscious of those elements. I think it's important for a prose writer to be conscious of exactly the same things. But at the same time, you don't want your prose to sound like poetry. If it does, I think you undermine the narrative aspect of the story. It's a difficult call.

DS: In most aspects, your newest novel is diametrically opposed to your previous one, Count Geiger's Blues—especially in tone. Was this an effort to spin things around and cover the range of tones and styles?

MB: The easy answer is yes. One thing I have attempted to do in my career from one book to the next is try something different each time. I'm sure that there are some people who would dispute that, because I've done a number of books that are anthropologically oriented in their scientific background, at least. Nevertheless, from one book to another I've tried very hard to set myself different challenges and to accomplish different things narratively. Each book should be distinct in some way or another. I would like it to be said of me when I finish my career, whenever that happens to be, that it wasn't easy to predict what kind of book I was going to write next.

DS: Do you have a favorite amongst your own novels, or can you even pick such a thing? Is that like picking favorite children?

MB: It's not like picking favorite children for me. I know some writers use that analogy and there is a certain degree of truth to it, but at the same time books don't have the kind of feelings that kids do. You would never tell one kid that the other kid is your favorite. [laughs] You realize with books that they are something you've created and are out there one way or another. I sometimes play favorites. Right now, I'd say my favorite book is Brittle Innings. For a long time it was Ancient of Days. I still like that one quite a bit. It was a book that didn't receive as much attention as I had hoped when it first came out. Maybe that's one of the reasons I like it.

DS: Over the course of your career you've written some books that deal with real people. You've received criticism for this.

MB: Are you referring to the Philip K. Dick novel where Richard Nixon figures as a character?

DS: Yes.

MB: My answer to that particular criticism was that the Nixon in that book is not necessarily Richard Nixon the person who is living in New York City right now. He is a construct from the particular persona that he presented to the public for a number of years as the president of the United States. That may sound like a kind of gobbledygook, but I do think that Nixon while he was president was presenting to the public one particular persona and in private had a completely different personality. I felt like he was fair game, at least, for a book that is a satire.

DS: What are you working on now, and what is upcoming?

MB: I have a novella called “Cri de Coeur” coming out in Asimov's Science Fiction in September [1994]. It will be the cover story. This was an attempt on my part to write the kind of story that most people don't think I can write—a story which is grounded so thoroughly in the sciences that people can accept it as being credible. I had some help on that one. I asked Geoff Landis, the winner of the Nebula Award for short story and an employee of NASA, and I had him vet a lot of the things I had done here. He was a great help to me. Nevertheless, I wanted to try a story like that. I've got two or three other things coming out as well.

DS: Some people find it harder to write at the shorter length—you have less room to play and any error you make is magnified greatly.

MB: It's probably easier to make a short story go wrong than a novel, because you do have to be so careful and precise about the way you lay out your materials. Nevertheless, I enjoy writing short fiction quite a lot. I think one of the reasons I do is that I'm a real fan of instant gratification. It takes so long to get a novel out, whereas a short story is something you can accomplish in two or three days or a couple of weeks and you have something finished in front of you. That's a very good feeling. One of the things about writing a novel that is difficult sometimes is just getting to the end of it. While you're at work on it, you sometimes think you are never going to finish. If I can use one metaphor that William Styron used several years ago, someone asked him about writing a novel and he said that writing a novel sometimes felt like walking from Vladivostok to Madrid on your knees. I think that's the way it can feel to a writer in the process of composition. Writing a short story is a real treat.

Poppy Brite was in on this shindig at the beginning. Not only was she one of the early folks to come on board at World Fantasy Con in 1992, but she was also one of the “Gang of Four” for that first studio interview. I honestly had not heard of her until about a month before this convention. My friend Rob Gibson loaned me a copy of Lost Souls which I read and devoured (no pun intended.) I was impressed with the strength of the imagery by this writer who was no older than I was. At WFC, I asked her about doing an interview and she gave me her card. Back then her cards had a picture of Kali on them, with one of the hands holding the head of J.R. “Bob” Dodds. She was a card-carrying member at the Church of the Subgenius at that time—I presume she still is. Some commitments you just don't turn from.

When we actually did our first interview in the studio, she did what felt like the worst thing possible, but it turned out to be a huge favor. I had my neatly typed up list of questions. About five minutes into the thing, she reached over and took this list out of my hand. She proceeded to answer every question on the list in about a minute, with one and two word answers. I could feel the flop sweat starting to break out on my forehead and thought I might pass out. I didn't. Instead, I had to on the spot dig a little deeper and ask the question beyond the questions she had already tossed off. It wasn't particularly fun, but it was a good learning experience. The lessons I learned were

1) always be prepared to do the interview without your notes if necessary,

2) listen carefully to what the guest says and see what follow up questions are natural extensions of what they are saying, and

3) hold your notes out of reach of the interviewee

The interview collected here is not that one. This is the second one I did with her, around the time of Drawing Blood. It was conducted in the lobby of the Westin Peachtree with a handheld cassette deck. We were sitting at adjacent couches and I moved the mike back and forth between us. Unless my memory is foggy, this is the first location interview I did. Up to this point, there were either in the studio or over the phone. I would go on to do many others later. This was my first learning experience of how damn tired your arm gets when you hold it out at an angle for half an hour. Later I discovered the arcane art of propping elbows on things—for this one I toughed it out and ached for hours afterward. There are tradeoffs on these location interviews. One downer is the lack of control over the environment. At any moment, business guys could and did come by talking about the quarter's sales figures. On the other hand, they always sound less dry than interviews in a sound-proofed room. I like a little ambient noise. In this one, the lounge piano kicks into a really enthusiastic version of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” as we wind it up, which always makes me smile when I hear it. It ties the whole thing to a specific sensory detail. That's what good fiction does so why should real life be any different? Perhaps it was just the difference in my comfort level, but I think this is a much better interview than the first. I did like being able to talk to Poppy about Tom Waits and comic books and the Athens band 5-8 (whom I saw play later that night, in fact.)

I lost touch with Poppy shortly after this interview, and never contacted her again until getting permission to include it in this book. I thought about trying to arrange another interview around the time of Exquisite Corpse but I didn't. Sometimes it goes that way. Still, I never sit down to an interview without thinking about the three lessons. I owe her.

This interview was recorded in the lobby of the Westin Peachtree hotel in Atlanta during October 1993.

DS: You are on the publicity tour for your new book Drawing Blood...

PZB: And also for the paperback of Lost Souls, which has just been released. I'm signing and reading from the book with author Melanie Tem, who is publicizing her new book Making Love, co-written with Nancy Holder. We'll be in 13 cities in 11 days and we'll be at the World Fantasy Convention. We'll be on TV in Toronto, and then we go home.

DS: Kind of a whirlwind tour, then. This is your second signing today, isn't it?

PZB: Yes, I've done three signings in the last 24 hours. I had one in New Orleans before I left town, and that went great, and then I signed in Columbus and here in Atlanta today. All of those except New Orleans were with Melanie and they've all been really good. I'm impressed so far. Tomorrow we sign in Athens, Georgia and then we fly to the west coast.

DS: The next tour, you'll have to make sure they don't book y'all into toilets like this one. [laughs]

PZB: [sarcastically] Yeah, this hotel is pretty awful. I've been here before and hoped I'd never have to come back. I didn't know it was the tallest hotel in America until I was reading some of the PR up in my room. It turns out it is.

DS: Let's talk about Drawing Blood. This is the one that was Birdland the last time we talked.

PZB: Yeah, I changed the title when I was almost through with it. I still like Birdland as a title, but I think that Drawing Blood has more applications to the story. It has more meanings within the context of the plot, and the publisher liked it a lot better. They felt that Birdland would make people think the book was about jazz, and that was too boring. It kind of is about jazz, but it's about a lot of other things as well. I didn't want to limit my audience by scaring them off with something like that.

DS: Tell us a little about the plot of the book and the setup of it.

PZB: Drawing Blood is a haunted house love story, also involving underground comics and computer hackers. It starts out in 1972 where we meet the McGee family. Bobby McGee is an underground comics artist, very famous and popular, somewhere around the level of R. Crumb at that same time. He is on the road with his wife and his family—two young sons. He has experienced an artist's block within the past year, and hasn't drawn anything for over a year. He has gone creatively dry. He's drinking a lot and things are not good within the family. They end up in Missing Mile, North Carolina—which is my fictional town that Lost Souls was partly set in. They rent an old farmhouse and are staying out there while Bobby is trying to draw something and still drinking way too much. He ends up murdering most of the family and committing suicide one night. He leaves only his five year old son Trevor alive. The action of the story opens 20 years later with Trevor returning to Missing Mile to try and figure out what happened and why he was left alive. He's now an artist himself and he stays in the house and tries to figure this out. We also have the converging story of Zach who is a 19 year old computer hacker from New Orleans who has just been warned that the Secret Service is on his tail. He has to leave town in a hurry, and he also ends up in Missing Mile.

DS: Again Missing Mile is the fulcrum of the book, like in Lost Souls. Various plot lines start and they all sort of careen into town.

PZB: It's not as convergent a story as Lost Souls because we don't have all these different groups of characters converging on town, just the two guys that end up there. Most of the story is set there. There are only a few chapters set in New Orleans. These are my two usual locales. The book that I'm working on now will be set almost entirely in New Orleans, in the French Quarter. I hope for the next book I can go somewhere else entirely.

DS: It's not a sequel to Lost Souls, other than just sharing the town and a few of the characters.

PZB: Exactly. The plot has nothing to do with it, there are no vampires in it—I'm done with vampires. Everyone keeps asking me when the sequel to Lost Souls is coming out, and the answer is never. I'm not Anne Rice, I'm not doing a trilogy on them. It's great that she revolutionized the vampire genre, but she basically built a career around one type of monster. I'm not interested in doing that. I've said all I have to say about bloodsucking vampires. I may write further about the type of psychic soulsuckers that also appear in the story. I'm still more interested in that.

PZB: But, to answer your question, it does share some of the minor characters from Lost Souls, such as Mackenzie Hummingbird who owns the Sacred Yew nightclub and Terry who runs the record store in the town. These are just figures of the counterculture that we are going to meet again and again, as long as I write about the town. The major characters are all new.

DS: You were a first novelist with Lost Souls, and you really hit it big. It was a courageous step to do something different. It would have been fairly easy to do the same sort of book. Did you specifically not want to get into a pattern like that?

PZB: It wouldn't have been easy at all, because I have no interest and I can't write about stuff that I'm not interested in, no matter how commercially successful it might be. I've tried, back before I was making a living as a writer, to do things like writing for Penthouse Forum. Freelance writers always hear they can make money doing things like that. I tried to write a letter for the Forum, and then I'd get interested in it. I'd try to make the characters interesting and then try to make it have a little plot and I'd end up putting so much energy into it that I would want to make it something I could publish under my own name. I had plumbed the depths of everything I have to say about vampires, and there was no way I could have written about those characters anymore. I've said everything about them that I had to. I'm glad that people like them enough that they would want to read a sequel, but I can't write one.

DS: Along with these other books, you've been up for quite a few awards now. You were up for the Lambda award, you've got the Bram Stoker...

PZB: I didn't get the Bram Stoker, I was nominated for it. Beth Massie won it.

DS: And “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves” is nominated for something.

PZB: That's nominated for a World Fantasy Award. I'll find out about that at WFC this coming weekend, but I have to compete with all kinds of great writers including Peter Straub so I really won't be too disappointed if I don't get it. Awards are very flattering but they don't mean a whole lot to me. I can't pretend that I'm disappointed when I don't get them. It would be nice if I did, but they don't seem like that big of a deal. It's certainly an honor to be nominated, as everyone always says, and it would be nice to get it, but—whatever.

DS: To have come out with a first novel that was so successful, you're happy and making a living, the awards are gravy on top of this, aren't they?

PZB: Not that I've actually gotten any of them, but it's nice to have gravy offered to you.

DS: [laughs] Just to smell it, even if you don't taste it. You spent five years as a struggling writer on the periphery of earning a living at it.

PZB: Well, I made my first sale when I was 18. I started making a living at it when I was 24 so it was more like six years.

DS: Is your life changing much now that you're not as close to starving as you used to be?

PZB: I'm working a lot harder. I'm working on the last book in my three book contract with Delacorte. Writing full-time in a lot of ways is much harder than any of the diverse jobs that I did to pay the rent before I was making a living at it. It's much nicer, much more fun, and there are more fringe benefits. I can justify doing things like taking trips to Asia and writing it off on my taxes as research. That's great. When I was doing all of the other jobs, I was writing all the time as well. A crap job, a job you do to pay the rent, you'll leave it behind when you go home and not care about it. As a full-time writer, I find that I'm always kicking myself in the butt and I always feel guilty about having any free time. I feel like I'm slacking off. I should always be in there sitting at the computer. I consider myself incredibly lazy, although people laugh at me when I say that. My friends laugh at me because they know the way I live and that I'm always staying up until 5 AM working on a story. The truth is that I am lazy. If I let myself, I would sit around all the time and read books and read comics and just do anything to amuse myself except what I should be doing.

DS: While you are talking comics, one of the main characters is an underground comics artist, you've got the rock and roll in the Sacred Yew, and you've got computer hackers. Basically, I'm the demographic for this book. You have all the things I think are cool in it.

PZB: [laughs] Publishers Weekly said something about the “Twenty-something zeitgeist of the book". I got a pretty nice review from them for Lost Souls but they lamented the fact that the book didn't have a moral center. Now the lack of a moral center has turned a twenty-something zeitgeist, so it's OK.

DS: That's what we can claim as are unifying point. None of us have a moral center.

PZB: Well, it's true.

DS: Which of the comics creators do you most enjoy?

PZB: Mary Fleener, Chester Brown, Julie Doucett. I've gotten away from my comics habit, unfortunately, since I moved to New Orleans. I had great comics shops in Athens, and now there aren't the great shops in New Orleans. The best one I've found has Yummy Fur sometimes, and that's about the extent of the alternative section. I'm going to have to actually subscribe to all of these things I want. I'm not finding as much new stuff as I used to, because now I have no one to recommend new things to me.

DS: Was Mark Bode an inspiration for the character of Trevor?

PZB: No. I've been told his story many times since I wrote the book, but I knew nothing about that when I wrote it. I was familiar with the work of Vaughn Bode, but I didn't know anything about how he had died or his kid or anything. It's just a coincidence, and rather an interesting one.

DS: There's a lot of the rock and roll sort of attitude. You use the Sacred Yew as the eye of the hurricane.

PZB: It is kind of the eye of the hurricane of Missing Mile. It's where all the lost kids end up sooner or later.

DS: Steve and Ghost were out of town the whole time.

PZB: That was not so much a plot device as just what's going on with them. They are continuing characters of mine, and I always know what's up with them. That's where they happen to be. It's a good thing, because I didn't need to try to write them into this story. It would have been kind of a pain in the butt. They were in Flagstaff, Arizona and they seemed to like it a lot there. I don't know when they're coming back to Missing Mile. These characters haunt me after I finish these books. I have a lifetime commitment to them. I know what happens to the characters in Drawing Blood after the end of the book. I won't say it here, because that would give too much away. If anyone wants to know, they can ask me. I'll tell them all about it. It's a good story. I might write it someday.

DS: I thought we would have a new Tom Waits album to talk about, but we missed it.

PZB: Apparently he just starred in this new Robert Altman movie, which I haven't seen yet, but it sounds great. Short Cuts.

DS: You also acknowledge Nine Inch Nails, and several other bands in the book.

PZB: Nine Inch Nails and Charlie Parker. There were several other single CDs that I listened to during the writing of Drawing Blood. It had a very specific soundtrack, or series of soundtracks. If I narrowed it down to one, it would have to be Pretty Hate Machine by Nine Inch Nails. It somehow become the soundtrack of the book and of their relationship. I listen to it 50 or 60% of the time while I was working on the story. For the sex scenes, they always insisted on Julee Cruse Into the Night. They wouldn't do it to anything else but that, and it seemed to work.

DS: Would you have a suggested soundtrack for reading it? I remember in the review for Lost Souls, Ed Bryant suggested Bloodletting by Concrete Blonde.

PZB: I'm not that familiar with Concrete Blonde, although I've seen them in Athens. All of the music that is mentioned in the story is the soundtrack for Lost Souls. That's the stuff I was listening to while I was writing it, and what the characters were listening to. It kind of ties into why I wrote my first novel about vampires. I liked them OK, but I had never been all that fascinated by them before then and haven't been since then. What I wanted to write about was the Gothic subculture, the death rock subculture and vampires are such an essential icon of that they just naturally turned up in there. The music of that culture is equally important, and that's all in the story too. I think the soundtrack to Lost Souls is self evident, because all of the songs are listed.

DS: Would it be safe to say that music is the underpinning of your writing?

PZB: I always listen to music while I'm writing. It's not as important to my work as it used to be. That's not to say that it's not important. It used to be the underpinning more so than now. At that time I was writing Lost Souls and my earliest short stories, I was getting most of my inspiration from music in one way or another. Now I'm taking it from more different sources. I've always read a lot and that's been very important, but as often as not my characters were as much amalgamations of certain musicians I might like as much as they were of people that I knew or people that just turned up in my head, or people that I'd read about. I'm not doing that so much anymore. There's not as many little Robert Smiths running through my stories as there used to be.

DS: Is the 5-8 in the acknowledgement the Athens band?

PZB: My best friend in Athens is David Ferguson, the lead singer of the Go Figures. His twin brother plays drums with 5-8. The book is half dedicated to David.

DS: I noticed the only female viewpoint character is Eddie. You're more comfortable writing from the male perspective than the female perspective. Do you find that staying a constant of your work?

PZB: I've always been more fascinated by men, gay men in particular, but all kinds of men. There are a lot of women that I'm very close to, that I like and admire and love, but overall, they don't fascinate me as a group that men do. I think that a writer needs to challenge themself, so at some point I will have to write stories about stronger female characters. That will be a challenge, because I have a hard time with them. At this point, it's just a challenge to write the stories that I already have in my head. Most of those involve men. I do think Eddie is a pretty cool character. She's a lot better than Ann in Lost Souls, you have to admit.

DS: Eddie is a dancer at a strip club, which you've been...

PZB: At Tattletales here in Atlanta, in fact.

DS: And the first time you introduce her, you mention the fact that guys in the strip club believe that, although these women see one thousand guys a day, they're the special one.

PZB: That was directly taken from my own experiences and the experiences of other dancers that I knew at the time. I thought that would be a way to make Eddie interesting right from the start, and that people would be interesting in knowing what actually goes on in a dancer's mind while she is on stage. I introduced her in that way. Up until then, you'd seen Zach thinking about Eddie and mentioning Eddie, but you hadn't been introduced to her. You wouldn't even know she is a girl. She is introduced in the scene as “Miss Lee” and then she turns out to be the same Eddie that he's been thinking about.

DS: The computer hacking aspect is all new to you. You're not much of a hacker yourself.

PZB: I don't know any programming, and that's pretty important to hacking. I'd be scared to learn any, because then I would be tempted to do bad things. I might be good enough to do it, but I wouldn't be good enough to avoid getting caught. I had certain research angels like Bruce Sterling who helped me out with that stuff. I could basically call with any question and if they didn't know, they would be able to come up with it. I really enjoyed researching it. There is a hacking element in the new book, not so much because there needed to be, but that I was so interested in it that I wanted an excuse to keep reading about it. This is more of a pure cyberpunk type of thing. It has to do with neural interfacing and brain jacking.

DS: I've never read a horror book with these elements in it. Are you breaking new ground here?

PZB: There is one paperback original by a writer named Chet Day, who I've never heard anything of, before or since, called The Hacker. I bought it on a whim because I saw it while I was working on Drawing Blood. I thought it would be some piece of trash, but it turned out to be really good. I enjoyed reading it, and I don't know why no one else has ever heard of it. Other than that, yes, I think this is new. Hacking stories have mostly been confined to science fiction, which I also enjoy reading, but I like the idea of combining the two.

DS: The rock culture is not so dissimilar from the hacking culture.

PZB: There is a lot of overlap. It all has to do with that “Twentysomething zeitgeist.”

DS: [laughs] You are about the youngest writer at your level of success in this genre.

PZB: I've read a few stories in the genre by people my age or younger, but no one that had already published two books. There is a young writer that I recently collaborated with on a story, Christa Faust, who I think is now 24. She has just finished her first novel, and I think she is going to hit it big. She's very good. We collaborated on a story “Saved” for Mike Baker's anthology Young Blood of horror writers under 30. There may be some other interesting names in there that we don't know about yet.

DS: They've started calling our generation Generation X. I would have thought we were too young to be Generation X.

PZB: I don't know about all that.

DS: You don't think about this?

PZB: I think a lot about it. For one thing, I would like to reach that group. I would like for that particular demographic to read my books. One, because it's huge and two because I think they would really like my work. I'd like to be marketed in the same ways that Douglas Copland has been. I think that Abyss is doing a lot of the right stuff to do that. They took out an ad in SPIN and sent me on this tour. A phenomonon that scares me is becoming a big fish in a small pond. Horror is a small pond—a wonderful pond and I love it very much, but I don't want to be limited to it. I want to be a whale in the ocean.

DS: [laughs] I saw the the ad [for Lost Souls] in SPIN, and it seemed like a canny move. Did they do it originally for the hardback, or just recently?

PZB: Just for the paperback. I hope the book will be reviewed in Details, which I think would be extremely helpful. I'd also like to reach a more mainstream gay audience. I have an underground gay audience, but I'd like to be reviewed an mentioned in publications like Out and The Advocate. I need to reach that group as well. I think I would be appreciated there, if they only knew I existed.

DS: What about ads on rock and roll radio stations?

PZB: I've heard a few book ads on radio, but it's always someone like Dean Koontz. If they wanted to, I'd certainly be willing to help in any way that I could. Obviously, I do radio interviews and stuff like that.

DS: When we were talking about Birdland originally, I forgot to ask you about the comic of the same name. Have you seen it?

PZB: I've just glanced at it. I really like the Hernandez Brothers, but I don't go for all that heterosexual sex. It doesn't do much for me. I love Love and Rockets, and it seems to have a lot more sexual diversity as well.

DS: Especially with Jaime's work. He seems to go after the same kind of subculture that you write about.

PZB: I don't remember exactly who did which work, but I like all of the Love and Rockets that I've read. I just glanced through Birdland, and the sex didn't seem so exciting. I was mad because there was already a comic called Birdland. It has no resemblance to the comic in my book whatsoever.

DS: Which underground comics figures were inspirations for Bobby McGee? Art Speigleman's work seems similar to what he was doing in the book.

PZB: I can see that, yeah. I wasn't specifically thinking of him, but I've been reading underground comics for so long and liking so many different artists that what turned up in the story was a distillation of everything that I had read that I liked. One of the sparks of inspiration for Drawing Blood was when I read Chester Brown's graphic novel, Ed the Happy Clown. I can't trace the direct line from that story to mine, but something went off in my brain when I read it, just realizing that something like that could exist in the world. Once in a while, I get these flashes where I realize that the world is even weirder than I thought it was, and I really like that. That was one of the things that made me feel it very strongly.

DS: And if you look at the work he did in it, over 2 years one month at a time, around page 40 he became brilliant and the work hit a new level. That gives us all hope that we can get that good at something that quickly.

PZB: Chester is great. I've invited him to my signing at Toronto. I sure hope he shows up.

DS: What is the book you are working on now?

PZB: It started out as the tale of the torrid affair between two cannibalistic serial killers, and that's still a big part of the plot, but all sorts of other things have gotten in there as well. I talked about the neural interfacing. It has HIV positive terrorism, pirate radio, Vietnamese-American culture in New Orleans. It has all sorts of things. It's going to take some research, but I think it's going to be a fun story. I'm considering something unheard of for me, working from an embryonic outline this time. I've never done that before. My method of plotting has been to barrel on through and see what happens. This is going to be more of a suspenseful, plot-driven story. I'm thinking about seeing what an outline can do for me. It might be different for a change.

Emma Bull has a distinction of excellence with regards to all the interviews done for Reality Break. She more than any other guest seems to take the act of being interviewed very seriously. This is not to say she is dour or doesn't sound like she's having fun—in fact, she sounds on tape like she's having a blast. Note here that I can't claim to have any special access to her thought processes or motivations—all of this is supposition on my part, and is in my opinion only. What it seems like is that no matter what question I asked her, every time she was a guest, she made the assumption that there was a question worth answering in there somewhere. Even if my question seemed dumb (or really was dumb), she would work to find the nugget of interest. Whether that meant restating it or answering a similar but slightly refocussed version of it, by the time she replied the question was not dumb at all. Let me tell you, my friends, for a talk show interviewer, guests like that are better than gold. God knows there have been moments where I'd have traded a dozen of the guest I had for one Emma Bull.

An interesting fact about Ms. Bull is that she was a formative influence on my growth from a fannish teenager to an SF insider (or whatever it would be that I am.) The Atlanta Fantasy Fair in the mid 80's was the premiere Georgia science fiction and comic book convention. I attended them all while I lived in Augusta, Georgia and later when I attended Georgia Tech. One year, she, her husband, Will Shetterly, and Steven Brust were all guests. I attended several panels that some or all of them were on, and they really impressed me. They all seemed so smart and witty and funny. During the con, I bought several of their books, including some of the Liavek anthologies, and novels from each of the three. They had a table for their publishing outfit, Steeldragon Press. I came by several times when I would look, but was too shy to actually walk up and talk to them. Finally I gathered the courage to approach them. I recall vividly Steve Brust looking at me like I was crazed and rabid, while Emma and Will were smiling and polite. They were giving away copies of Captain Confederacy, one of my favorite comics of that time. I mentioned that I already had all the issues in the series, so Will and Emma dug through their stuff until they found an old issue of a mini-comic they put out and gave that to me. I still have it.

The point of this whole story is that to my teenage self, Emma Bull and her posse seemed so cool, like they were having such a good time that I wanted to be like that. It never occurred to me then that within a few years I could be having conversations with her about her work and, moreover, that she would be mining for gold in the silt and sand of my end of that conversation. It just goes to show that truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction.

This interview was recorded over the phone with Emma in Minneapolis, Minnesota in April 1994.

DS: The interview began with her discussing the Borderlands series.

EB: Terri Windling was the editor for the anthologies: Borderlands, Bordertown, and Life On The Border, in which, well, the setting is a place that she made up, which is a world in which it's a little bit in the future and the elflands, the lands of Faerie, have come back from wherever it was that they disappeared to, after they appeared in all of those folksongs and legends and things. They're not here now, so they must've gone someplace, so now they're back. Humans can't get into the elflands, but they can get into the area on the border, called, obviously enough, “The Borderland". There magic works and human science works but both of them work intermittently and it's become a magnet for runaway kids, kind of the way New York City is, or London, or any of those places that kids run away to. It's also, interestingly enough, a magnet for runaway elf kids, who are likewise dissatisfied with the culture they live in, their lives, or whatever. So, it's a setting that pretty much allows for almost any kind of story you want to tell; and Terri asked my husband Will Shetterly and I to write her a story for the second anthology, Bordertown, and we came up with a couple of characters that we used in that story who we had a lot of fun with. We like that. So Will turned around and wrote a couple of novels using one of his characters set there, and I watched him do this and he was having a lot of fun, and I got really jealous, and I said “Enough of this! I'm writing my own Bordertown novel. So there!” So, that was what Finder was. It's got a few of the characters that we wrote for the Bordertown anthology, and it was great fun. That's sort of the background of how I came to write it.

DS: Tell us a little about the plot and the things specific to your novel.

EB: Ah, you don't want to hear about the plot of a book! Plots always sound dumb when you tell'em to people.

DS: Okay, we'll skip the plot.

EB: I can do it, but they do sound dumb, you know. [laughs] Imagine trying to explain the plot of one of the Foundation novels or The Stars My Destination. It sounds dumb.

DS: [laughs] Okay, so you've set yourself up as an unresponsive witness now.

EB: No, no. Just honest. Actually, okay. The shorthand of the plot is invoking runaways again. We've got a character who ran away from home because he had a lot of trouble because he was weird. Not just the usual kind of weirdness. I mean, all high school kids don't fit in. It's part of the process of evolving as a human being, I think. But he was a human being with a fey talent. He could find things for people. If you had lost something, you would come and tell him that, uh, you've lost your car keys, and he would go with you and he would look around until he found your car keys. And he could always do it. And after people got over thinking, “Wow, that's neat,” they started thinking, “Uh, that's kinda weird. I don't know about this guy.” And he had a lot of trouble, so he runs away. The book is part coming-of-age novel and part police procedural, because he ends up being recruited by what passes for the police in Bordertown to help this cop solve a problem. In the course of it, he ends up coming to terms with what he does, and who he is.

DS: Now see, that doesn't sound dumb at all. That sounds great.

EB: [laughs] Yeah, well, I sort of doctored it up a little.

DS: The setting that you have interests me. I like any setting like this. I remember First Comics, they had the fractured, multidimensional city of Cynosure.

EB: Oh, yeah.

DS: Already you've got a very chaotic environment. Does that give you more leeway to do anything that you want? Here you have a mystery inside this setting.

EB: I tend to think that any really good setting allows for the same range of stories that you get in real life, though I confess that my favorite of the Bordertown stories are the ones that don't actually have very much magic and action in them at all. I think my favorite is called “Mockery” and I think it's by Bellamy Bach and Ellen Kushner. It's a story of four kids of various elf and human backgrounds and the lies that they tell to each other, and the fronts that they put up to try to convince people that they're more important than they are, and in the process lose track of what the things are about them that really are important. The magic is beside the point in that. So, this setting really does allow you to do just practically anything. I mean, if you want to write a J.D. Salinger novel set in Bordertown, it seems to be something you can do. I think that's kind of a measure of the quality of the setting—not so much “chaotic” as “full of possibility".

DS: With this book having the mystery structure, there are a few of the basic conventions of any mystery story. Anytime you have a civilian dectective, to some extent they have to resemble an episode of “Murder, She Wrote". Why are you there? And you have specific ways of addressing this that you wouldn't normally have in a mystery story. I'm thinking of the compulsive nature of the “finding". Does that in its own way “make” the story? It brings to the story a logic it wouldn't otherwise have.

EB: Well, there's that. There is the magical logic of this kid's talent. There's also what I got to do with, nobody had much explored the whole principle of the police in Bordertown before. That was sort of the section that I cut out. Part of what gave me the freedom to introduce things like a non-cop investigating this, was that I imagined the structure of law enforcement in Bordertown as being, well, not very structured at all. I thought, “Okay, this is a town that kind of exists almost accidentally. But it's come together simply because it's the best jumping-off point either to the [human] world or to the world of Faerie. And so it kind of exists in that restless frontier-town fashion. It's not as if there's a police academy; it's not as if this is a group of people who have to answer to any other law enforcement body. They're pretty much cut off from all of the rest of the world of this, either whatever passes for law in the elflands, or in the human world. And yet how does society deal with [people] who just, no matter what you do, are going to make life difficult for their fellow people? One of the responses to that, not necessarily the best one or the only one, is to come up with a group of people who enforce the law. Figuring out what form that would take in Bordertown, if it would have a form, exactly, at all, was great fun. That was my chance to kind of look at the police from the inside out. What are the things that you really have to have if you are the police? What are the things that people just assume “this is the way police behave"? So that was part of my excuse for throwing in some of the plot devices of mystery and being able to say, “Yes, but look, I have this other reason for it!”

DS: Was it tough to kind of walk the line between having the police be ineffectual and completely authoritarian?

EB: Um, yeah. I grew up as a nice suburban kid being told that if you got lost, that you could ask the police to help you find your parents and your house and whatever, and they would do that and that was part of their job. And that is warring with me now as an adult, looking at the way that too many individual officers and too many police departments see their job. As I was writing the book I discovered that one of the things that bothered me about law enforcement as it exists now is that there seems to be a feeling among a lot of police officers that, if they catch somebody, they must be guilty. Their job is not to bring in suspects, or stop people from hurting each other. Their job is to find the person who is guilty and make sure they're punished. So the separation between the police and the legal system is getting very fuzzy. One of the things that I wanted was an idealistic woman who thought that her job was to be a cop, but she wasn't certain what that meant, and she was trying to rebuild it from scratch. And that was my opportunity to find out what *I* thought a cop did. Yeah, it's a tough line to walk, okay, heck, it's a tougher line to walk to be a cop and to be an honest cop, and to figure out where your job begins and ends. And so, messing with it in fiction was just another really good way to examine that.

DS: Let's talk a little about your life as a musician.

EB: Okay.

DS: You're in several groups. Are they both concurrent? You're in Cats Laughing and The Flash Girls.

EB: Yep, and they're both going. For a while, we were saying that Cats Laughing was on “indefinite hiatus". Cats Laughing, by the way, is Steven Brust on drums, another fantasy author that your listeners may very well recognize, Adam Stempel, who is also the lead guitarist and singer for Boiled In Lead now; and Lojo Russo, Frank Runyon, and me. How many people was that?

DS: I think we're up to six.

EB: No, there are five people. Okay, and that's Cats Laughing as it is constituted now. For the longest time we said, “No, no, Cats Laughing is no more,” and then we began to play. We were playing very much amplified and electric and we started getting more and more acoustic, and we discovered that we're kind of a folk-jazz band, acoustically, and it was a lot more fun, and we had less equipment to carry to gigs and that's kind of rejuvenated us, so we're back on the track. And The Flash Girls is myself on guitar and vocals and Lorraine Garland playing the fiddle and singing, and we put out our first cd kind of the tail end of last year.

DS: And the name of that is “The Return of—

EB: The Return of Pansy Smith and Violet Jones.

DS: Okay.

EB: And we've got some songs on there with lyrics by Neil Gaiman, and an afterword by Neil Gaiman, and some songs by me, and songs by Lorraine, and great fun.

DS: Now you also have kind of an intersection between your music as you write it and your books, and you've written books about music and also the music from your books are on albums you've done.

EB: [laughs] That's true. That's true. I mean, never let anything go to waste, you know.

DS: So which end do you enjoy more? I mean, I guess that “enjoying more” is not exactly correct.

EB: Yeah, it's a different kind of critter. The wonderful thing about the music, that makes it so much fun is, that, in a band or in a duo, it's a collaborative meeting. You get to work with other people who are doing what you're doing. You get to establish some kind of creative dialogue. That's really satisfying. It makes you go back and work harder. It's also kind of nice to be able to do what you do right there in front of people and get the immediate feedback. As an author, you work by yourself and you don't find out what anybody thought of the book until well after they think it. Whereas, if you perform a song right in front of somebody, they laugh at the good lines, they applaud afterwards, you know, you're right there. You get to see what their face does when you play it for them. But the writing is a longer, more sustained effort, and you don't have the drawbacks of collaboration. You don't have any sense that, “Well, okay, okay, we need to showcase everybody; we need to make the compromises to make everybody happy. It's just you, and your computer or your typewriter, or your pen. You get to say what you think; right there, in private, nobody looking over your shoulder. And then afterward you get to go back, at leisure, and say, “Now, did I really mean to say that?”

DS: You've worked in several different shared worlds situations with this and also with the Liavek books. Is it kind of a bridge between the isolation of writing and the collaboration of music? Here you're writing in isolation but you've also got people in there with you, throwing in characters and ideas.

EB: Yeah, and it's a relatively painless way to collaborate, because you're not really cross-checking sentences with people as much. You're just kind of picking up on things that people develop and kind of running with them in your direction—with their permission, of course. You've still got the freedom to write the story the way you want it, but you've also got the fun of finding things that people have already written or created. They're kind of left lying there for you to use, and you come around the corner and discover “Bingo!” exactly the thing that I needed for that scene. This person has already set up this interaction with this dreadful camel or whatever it is. There is a dreadful camel in the first Lliavek anthology that runs through kind of a lot of stories. We had a lot of fun with that.

DS: You've written across several different genres. You've written science fiction, you've written fantasy. Do you get different things from each sort of genre?

EB: Good question. On a kind of a small-scale sense, yes. I always have fun putting in kind of contemporary, topical references; I always have fun putting in references to movies and things like that. You can do that in near-future science fiction, though in science fiction set very far in the future, the idea that people would be paying any attention to the music that we think is important, or the movies that we think are important, is kind of far-fetched, because popular culture just keeps barreling onward at a breakneck speed. Unless you actually throw a roadblock in its way. You've got to assume that the popular culture that you're writing about in further future science fiction is going to be almost unrecognizable. Fantasy, obviously, unless it's contemporary fantasy set in this world, you're not going to be able to do that kind of cultural reference. But that's pretty small scale. As far as what fantasy or science fiction can do, like the really big parts of what you can do in fiction, what each one of them provides is really pretty much the same. I suspect it is not significantly different from what any kind of fiction provides. This is going to sound like I'm being hoity-toity and saying “No, no, no. I don't write that genre fiction", because I do write genre fiction, and I read it, and I love it, but I don't really think of myself as writing it necessarily on purpose.

DS: You get the story, and you get to pick the genre to fit the story you've got to tell.

EB: Yeah, kind of. And that there are a lot of ways even to tell that particular story, and the way that I happen on more often than not is fantasy or science fiction because I like it. But I don't really think of what I'm writing in relation to the rest of fantasy and science fiction.

DS: Okay. Fair enough.

EB: Yeah. I don't know if that's exactly saying what I mean, but that's all right. I'll listen to the radio show and I'll find out either yes, that's what I meant, or no, that's not what I meant.

DS: We'll let it ride.

EB: Okay.

DS: Now, in your book Finder, obviously, some of this will have been established by other people, but your book turns on the fact that the elves are the elite of the society to the point that people who are not elves wish that they were elves.

EB: Well, yeah. The elves think that they're the elite of this society, and some of the humans think that they're the elite of this society. More it was kind of thinking back on my high school days and realizing everybody thinks they're a geek in high school. Even the people who are, like, the head of the cheerleading squad, or the quarterback on the football team, or the editor of the newspaper, they all think that they're geeks. They certainly don't fit in. They're having a horrible time. Everyone assumes that all those other people in high school are having a better experience than they are and no one is as miserable as they are, and they're all as miserable as you are. The idea is that you can come to the Borderlands, run away from home; run away from all the things that you had been and say, “Okay, now I'll be a magical person.” You would get there, and you discover this was in some ways worse. Now the captain of the football team and the head cheerleader and the editor of the newspaper really are magical people. They're unbelievably beautiful. They have these magical talents. They come from this great place. How can you compete? And for people who really were having trouble finding their place, either in the human world or in the world of the Borderlands, it would be really attractive to think, “That's it. Bingo, right there. I really can become somebody else, finally.” That would be almost an irresistible lure to people who are really hurting about their self-image and about their capabilities.

DS: Also in the book you've got the theme running through it of friendship and the book really hinges pretty heavily on that. Do you like writing about these strong friend relationships and deep emotions of that sort?

EB: Yeah, and that, I think, I can even pinpoint my formative influences on that. I grew up during the heyday of “The Man From Uncle” TV show, “The Avengers", and I was a junkie for these things—just loved them. Part of what I liked was that wonderful, intimate, off-hand interaction between the characters, who were clearly very good friends, were always right there for each other. I mean, they literally trusted each other with their lives, but also had that kind of wise-cracking, you know, wiseguy kind of attitude. Another reference is “The Wild, Wild West". James West and Artemus Gordon were this wonderful team, you know, and you could tell that neither of them would work as well apart, and I think that was a formative influence. TV made me what I am today.

DS: That would be a great pull-quote on a book or something.

EB: I've got a button that says it. I wear it proudly. I suppose it's not a very good thing to say on the radio, jeeze.

DS: We're running drastically short on time, and there's so much more to cover. Tell us a little more about your children's book, The Princess And The Lord Of Night.

EB: That was really a treat for me, because I didn't even know that that was what I was doing. I wanted to write a story as a present for Steve Brust's daughter, Caroline, and I wrote this short story and read it out loud to Caroline's class, and I thought, “That's that; and that was really fun, and I liked that,” and Jane Yolen, who is not only a real swell writer, but is editing a line of children's books for Harcourt Brace heard that I had done it and said, “Why don't you send it to me? It's a story for kids; I write kids’ books, I could maybe tell you what to do with it.” And she read it, and she said, “Well, the Jane Yolen book line doesn't usually do picture books, but I would like to do this as a picture book. Why don't you sell it to me, and we'll find an artist, and see what happens.” I was delighted. I hadn't even realized I'd written a picture book, and my god, it's beautiful! It's illustrated by Susan Gabriel, who has done several other really swell picture books for kids. Her illustrations are influenced by Renaissance painting. It's got some of that kind of composition and some of those kind of glowing colors. It's just a great, great book. I love her paintings. They're wonderful.

DS: What works do you have that'll be out? Do you have any short fiction that's in scattered places?

EB: No, I don't actually write too many short stories. The ones that I have written friends have asked me to write for particular anthologies or collections or things, and something will spark an idea and I'll write that. Usually all of my ideas grow and grow and grow and grow and grow until they're immense. I did write a novella for the collection that came out last year called After the King. It was in honor of the J.R.R. Tolkien centennial. I'm busy turning that into a young adult novel for Jane Yolen, which is much more like the sort of thing she usually does for the Jane Yolen books line. Part of the reason why I don't have to expand it very much is because I wrote this story as a novella and it got swollen up until it was 15,000 words long, which was the longest story, I think, in the entire collection. It was a veritable Godzilla of a story. So I'm working on that, and that isn't scheduled yet.

Transcribed by l.j. anderson, laurie@ecology.uga.edu

This interview is the first of the four I have done with Nicola Griffith, the only interview in this eBook of the infamous “Gang of Four” interviews from the first day of the radio show. It's not the best one, but it is interesting in a number of ways. The first is that it's pretty good, which is Nicola's work and not mine. She is always a thoughtful and incisive guest. Another is that it is somewhat more revealing in places than you might expect. This was fairly early in her career, and she didn't have the “firewall” that comes with having to talk about yourself and your work over and over. Sometimes, the people who get interviewed the most are the worst guests, because it is so hard to shake them out of that well-worn groove.

I was put in touch with Nicola by Mark Stevens at The Science Fiction and Mystery Bookshop. As I was soliciting donations of books to the cause, he mentioned her as a first novelist who might like to be on the radio. At the time of this interview, the only work of hers available in an American edition was one short story that had been reprinted in Aboriginal SF from Interzone. Ammonite hadn't come out yet, her other stories were either in Interzone or British anthologies. Despite all this, we talked about Ammonite and I really enjoyed the conversation. It's not that common for me to read or finish a book from an interview after it is no longer necessary. This is not because I don't want to, but when I was doing one of these every week, there was no time. Ammonite I went back and read and liked a lot.

This interview was recorded in the WREK studios in Atlanta, Georgia in December 1992.

DS: You are just publishing your first novel, and the name is Ammonite.

NG: I don't know if you are familiar with what an ammonite is, but it is a fossilized shell that curves around in a spiral a little bit like a chambered nautilus. They're about 150 million years old.

DS: What is the novel about? What is the theme?

NG: That depends upon whom I am talking to. There are three basic sound bite ways to describe it. One is that it's a neat biological puzzle with some genetic engineering. One is that it's a radical reexamination of gender and one is that it's an adventure story set on another planet, so it really depends on who I am talking to at the time. I tend to think of it as a story about one woman who goes to a new place and discovers things about herself and other people. She does that in various ways.

DS: You've been selling short fiction for 4 or 5 years.

NG: I sold my first story in 1987, which didn't appear until 1988. Most of my work, in fact, all of my work apart from one story, has appeared in the United Kingdom.

DS: That one story was “Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese” which was in Aboriginal SF last summer. What provoked the swap between Interzone and Aboriginal?

NG: I believe that it was a marketing idea. It meant that they could all relax for one issue and go on holiday. They had one editor in America that was doing the work for one month for the British people, and then for one month the British people did the work for the Americans. David Pringle, the editor of Interzone, got to go on holiday for a few weeks.

DS: At the time, that being your only exposure in this country, that was probably a bonus for you.

NG: Oh yes. I had written this story, and I was very pleased to sell it twice. It was great.

DS: Did you get any feedback from America having published it here, it being your only appearance at that point? Did it open up the American market for you?

NG: Not at all. It pretty much sank without a trace. I got a letter from Bruce Bethke, the SFWA treasurer at the time, who said that he read it and that he understood that I had chronic fatigue syndrome, which of course I do, and he said that it was very poignant knowing your story. It was just a little note. That was it, that was the only feedback I got apart from my friends who all phoned up, and said “I thought it was a great story.”

DS: When did you move to America?

NG: That's a long story. In 1988 I came over to MSU for six weeks to do a writing workshop—Clarion. The teachers were people like Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm, Lisa Goldstein, Tim Powers, Kim Stanley Robinson, Chip Delany. I had no idea that they were going to accept me because it was one of those things that you would read in magazines that “So and so went to Clarion” and think that it must be some mythical, magical thing that people go to. This was before I had published any work and had just applied and thought that they probably wouldn't take me but it would be nice to go to America for six weeks. Lo and behold, they wrote back that they'd love for me to come. Then I panicked because I hadn't expected to get accepted, and also I was the first UK citizen to be asked there so I didn't know what a person did, and I had no money, etc. I finally got here, and during those six weeks I met Kelley, the woman I now live with. I had to come back to England for a year and sell my house and so forth, and then I came back to this country in December of 1989. We lived in Duluth, and then Decatur, and now Atlanta.

DS: That's pretty interesting. All of your work is still selling in the UK but you've been living here for three years now. Is that because your contacts are still over there?

NG: I believe it's the difference between the two markets. Most all of my protagonists in everything I've written, except for one in a story I wrote a while back, are lesbians which tends to make some editors a little wary. Not much, it's not enough in and of itself to make the editor go “Eek! I can't publish that!” but the fact is that the science fiction I write isn't rocket ships and blasters and neat computer gadgets. It's very much about people with sometimes just SF window dressing. Over here, editors are more strict about what they classify as science fiction.

DS: Would you say that the American editors are perhaps a little more shy, a little more mainstream?

NG: They are more mainstream science fictional, yes. I would say the English market is more mainstream in terms of being closer to “literature".

DS: Are they more adventurous in the UK—more willing to take a chance on the subject matter?

NG: I would say so. Everything is not done in quite such a committee format. You know what you are going to get when you open Asimov's SF Magazine, you know roughly the parameters that you are going to encounter. You open Interzone and you, well, I, at least, have no idea what I'm going to read. It could be a revolting story like Brian Aldiss's last piece called “Horsemeat” which was frankly disgusting misogynist and so on, and made me feel while I was reading it that I would like to throw the author up against the wall and take a blunt instrument to him. Or it could be a whimsical fantasy or it could be virus and rocket ships and bug-eyed monsters. You really have no idea. That's what interests me about the magazine.

DS: Do you see that as a weakness of the American market? Do you think that tastes—which comes first, the taste of the American people, or is that all they know because that's all they ever see?

NG: It's the publishing history. I think science fiction in this country and science fiction in the UK developed along completely different lines. In this country it developed from Hugo Gernsback and so on, it developed from pulp fiction. In England, it developed from H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and so on. It developed parallel with, and often on the same road as, literature. It just has a different history. I think you could characterize it by saying that in England readers expect science fiction to be adult fiction, whereas occasionally readers in this country, and I'm not talking particularly about science fiction readers per se, but the general readers tend to regard sf as a juvenile literature. You can tell that by looking at the covers, I think.

DS: It's not quite as ghettoized.

NG: Yeah.

DS: Is one more likely for a normal person with no particular interest in SF to pick up an SF novel in England than in America?

NG: I would say so, just because of the way that it is packaged. My book Ammonite, for example, is coming out from HarperCollins in England and the cover of that is just a huge gold ammonite on a deep blue background. I don't know what kind of audience that will immediately attract, but it has a different look to the one that is coming out in this country from Del Rey. This one has a big bright red airlock, a planet and a jelly bean looking spaceship zipping off in the background. That's going to appeal to people who go “Oh, a spaceship!” There just going to see the book differently. I think, because of that, they may read the book differently, too.

DS: When you first came to this country, you said that you had a lot of problems with INS. Tell me about the idea of being a writer of note.

NG: That is an Immigration and Naturalization Service definition. How I got my visa to come into this country, I'm on an H1B professional visa. I came in on two platforms. One is by getting a contract for a book of short stories from New Victoria Publishers, which is a lesbian/feminist press based in Vermont, and one is being a “writer of prominence.” That basically means that I could get lots of letters from people like Damon Knight saying “Oh, she's fab; take her.” and I could document the fact that I've published work in the UK and that I was having some work translated into Spanish and a French publisher wanted some of my short work, and I had done some teaching and that, basically, I wasn't some yob off the street who was going to attack people in this country or kill babies or otherwise be antisocial.

DS: Are you in a situation where you basically have to keep writing? Can they pull the plug on you?

NG: My visa runs out in February 1994. When that happens, I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do. I could probably get another visa issued by getting another book contract with Ballantine, but really what I'm going to go after is the golden apple. I'm going to try for a green card. There are four basic ways I personally could get a green card in this country. One would be by investing a million dollars in an American company, which will employ twenty or more American citizens; one would be to marry a person of the opposite sex, which, of course, I'm not going to do; one is to have a baby, which also I'm not going to do; and the other is to become extremely famous very quickly, which is the only chance I have. As you can imagine, that's not the terribly likely except it seems to be the only way to go. I can either win the lottery, have a baby, get married, or become famous. There is a fifth possibility. I could get a permanent and very prestigious job, example being professor of comparative literature at Yale, which isn't horribly likely either.

DS: Do you feel the pressure from that.

NG: Just a bit. Yes, I do. Apart from earning my living writing, which anybody here will testify is not easy, I have to bear this double burden. I feel like, as well as getting a book published and making sure people read it and enjoy it, I feel like everything I publish has to be very very damn good. It has to be able to be held up to the light by critics of other literary fields to say “Yes, she is worthy of getting grants” because I'm going to need to get grants, I'm going to need to win prizes to get my green card.

DS: You've mentioned your work holding up to other critics. You work as a book reviewer, your only work other than writing fiction, for Southern Voice. Is there a dichotomy between reviewing other people's work and writing your own work?

NG: The important thing to remember I think for me when I'm reviewing is that I shouldn't review other people's work as though it was one of my first drafts. The temptation is to say “Well, I wouldn't have don it that way. God! If they'd just take this character and put her here, or made this happen, etc.” The important thing is to see what is actually there and read it for itself and then look at it. It's also, I review quite a lot of nonfiction, which I can talk about in a bit if you like, and the fiction I do review is lesbian and gay “literature". I keep putting literature in quotes, because it's a genre as much as science fiction or fantasy or horror.

DS: Do each of these different subgroups have their own set of standards for what good writing would be?

NG: Not so much for good writing, but for how to write. There are certain writing and reading protocols. For example, I'm sure many people have heard of the science fiction reading protocol in that if you read a sentence that says “The door irised open” you know immediately that you are in a science fiction novel, because doors do not iris in this present time and place. You know you are on a spaceship or an airlock or some futuristic kind of thing. Lesbian and gay novels have their own protocols, their own coming out layers, their own tackling of homophobia and so forth. It's a fairly new genre, so that protocols aren't set in stone.

DS: With your first novel coming out soon, have you seen a review of it yet?

NG: Yes! I would like to talk about that. I have seen two reviews of my novel Ammonite. They both pissed me off for separate reasons. The first review was a very short review by Faren Miller in Locus. It was a short take, and she liked the book mostly. She talked about “masterly sure handedness and so forth but she said there were aggravating lapses. In other words there were large parts of the novel that she really didn't like. I thought about it for a while and I have decided that what she didn't like was the fact that my protagonist actually has problems. She is not always full of life and happy-go-lucky. She is not indomitable, not omnipotent. She, at some point, loses her way emotionally, spiritually and literally. She gets kidnapped, she gets hurt physically, she gets lost. She loses her self-esteem, her sense of self and goes into a kind of psychic shock. In other words she doesn't act like a heroine. That I think pissed off Faren Miller because she is used to reading SF novels where the characters are superwomen and supermen. I think it upset her world view to have an SF protagonist having a hard time.

DS: If you are doing something off the beaten track, shouldn't that be perceived as good. Rather than a rehash, are people going to say that you are breaking new ground or that it isn't what they are used to?

NG: Let me talk about the second review, which brings some of those questions into relief. The second review was 1000 or 1200 words, and it was also in Locus, by Dan Chow. I'm sure he thinks he is doing me a favor by some of the things he says when he talks about it breaking new ground and being extraordinary and so on. What he does is call is a “lesbian science fiction novel” which it isn't. I'm the author, I'm a lesbian. My protagonist is a lesbian, and she has a lesbian love affair. It's no more a book about being lesbian than Neuromancer is a book about coming to terms with ones heterosexuality. Because everyone in the book is straight doesn't mean that the book is about being straight. That's one of the things that happens when you do leave the beaten track is that people fall on you like a ton of bricks, smiling. They say “I'm sure you are doing very well, Nicola. I'm sure you are trying very hard and it's quite a good effort but really ... tsk, tsk.” There is a wagging of fingers and a real condescension in the review, a real “she tried hard but it's only about lesbians, without men in it, it's a bit narrow minded.”

DS: Having read reviews that made you angry, does that make you rethink how you review others?

NG: Those two in particular didn't, because I like to think that I've already worked past those particular problems. Sometimes I read a review and think “God, I hope I don't make that mistake” or “That's a clever way to approach another person's writing.” I learn a lot from reviewing and from reading other's reviews.

DS: Let's talk about your life outside of writing. You have a very interesting career history, to say the least. What kind of bands have you been in?

NG: Just one band, called Janes Plane. It was a women's band, in a city called Hull in England. I fronted it, I was the songwriter and sometimes percussion player. We were an in-your-face with shaved heads and big boots and waistcoats. I sang about cutting up people in the street if they got in my way. We were on network TV, but as soon as we were offered the college circuit our drummer decided she wanted to be the sound engineer for a TV cartoon series, and we couldn't find another competent woman drummer. Me and the guitarist set up as, not a band—I'm not sure what you would call it, but I wrote all of the music and we did chants and played drums and I made this percussion thing out of a Fijian wood block and a tambourine and two broken drumsticks. [laughs] We would go to theaters and sing during the intermissions. We basically sang for our supper, because I was really broke at the time.

DS: Do you see some similarity between trying to break into the music business and trying to break in as a writer? In both you have a steep pyramid with very few at the top, but many others that would like to be at the top.

NG: I read somewhere that someone once said that in order to make one's living in any field of creative endeavor one had to be almost psychotic. You have to believe in yourself so strongly, to sit there day after day with your computer or your pen or your piece of paper or guitar, and think “I can do this. 999 billion people before me have failed, but *I* can do this.” It's quite a psychotic state of mind to have to hang onto year after year. It takes years. Nobody does it overnight.

DS: Are there ever times that you feel that you are losing that intensity, self-doubt where you say “I've done it before, but I don't know if I can do it again?"

NG: Often. Well, I say often and sound definite but what happens is that it is split into two layers. There is a deep core that knows that I can keep doing it. There is a surface stream that says “Maybe that won't work.” It's happening a little right now as I have started two more novels, and I keep hesitating. I write a bit and think “I could do this another way, this character should go here.” Basically, I have so many choices now because I'm a better writer than I was a year ago when I wrote Ammonite. It's casting doubt on myself because I can see so many alternate ways to make something work that I hesitate a lot. I often do that at the beginning of any piece of work. Once I get well into the novel, I'll be fine.

DS: You've talked about being a member of the Clarion workshop. Do you think that that really helped your career? Without that, would you have had a similar career?

NG: I'm not sure. I don't think it changed the way I write, but I do think it changed the way I regard being a writer. It's a subtle distinction. Before I went to Clarion, I knew I wanted to be a writer. After I came back, I knew I was going to make myself be a writer. My determination hardened, I became more professional. The letters I sent to editors were no longer “Buy this you jerk"—not that I did that a lot, but the temptation was there. After Clarion, I would say “This is what I've written, I hope you enjoy it.” I took things less personally. If someone rejected my work, I didn't think they had no taste. Maybe it's not a very good story, or maybe they don't like it, or maybe they are under editorial constraint. Also, it gave me access to other professional writers. The one I've had the most contact with is Tim Powers. We talk often on the phone. He hasn't exactly given me brilliant advice, mainly because I haven't asked, but he gives me hope, simply by being there. I can phone him up and say “I'm having a really shitty time with this outline.” His response is “Yeah, me too. You wait a minute while I get myself a beer and we'll talk about this.” The fact that he's been through it all before and that he's survived it helps.

DS: That's a theme that's recurring a lot in these interviews, the sense of community. You seem to have benefited from it. Is that someone that you knew you would get?

NG: I had no idea. I didn't know that a quote “science fiction community” unquote existed or that there was such a thing as fandom or sf conventions. I knew nothing. I just wrote Ammonite. I knew there was a magazine called Interzone in England and I knew there were sf books that people published and read, but I had no idea that there was this whole sense of connectedness.

DS: You came from outside of the field. Would that account for the convention breaking that you exhibit in your work?

NG: I'm not sure. I think coming from England helps in the sense that there seems to be less of a...

DS: Is there less baggage, that not having read so much in the field you don't feel you need to match with what has come before?

NG: There isn't such a pressure to conform.

Because of the logistics of doing interviews, most of the interviews I've ever done have been over the phone. That's a shame, because in person interviews are much more fun and are easier. You can see the guests, tell by the expression on their faces how things are going, and generally connect better. At the time I interviewed Ann Kennedy and Chris Reed I had not done a studio interview in a very long time. Being able to actually sit across the console from them and talk to them was so immensely pleasurable that it made everything loose and fun. As I recall, Ann approached me about doing the interview because she and Chris were already going to be in town anyway and wanted to get as much bang out of the trip as possible. I had heard of both of their magazines, The Silver Web and Back Brain Recluse, but had not read either prior to the interview. When I did, I enjoyed both quite a bit. The Silver Web is darker than most of the short fiction I read but since this interview, I've become a regular reader of it.

The circumstances surrounding this interview were a little odd. That day, my wife Darlene and I were volunteers at the first Music Midtown festival in Atlanta. We spent the morning and early afternoon out in the Atlanta sun, painting children's faces despite our having no face painting training or aptitude. My strategy was to steer kids towards those things I knew I could do—"Wouldn't you like a pretty rainbow?” After hours and hours of this interrupted only by sneaking off and seeing bands like The Smithereens and Band du Soleil, we headed for the radio station. By the time we got there, I was about half-exhausted from being in the sun all day and ready for a nap. We had intended to be there plenty early, but instead beat Ann and Chris by only about 5 or 10 minutes so there wasn't much time for setting up. I don't know what their experience was, but I immediately liked both of them quite a bit. I knew right away that I would be able to have a good half-hour conversation with them.

In a lot of ways, I felt they were both kindred spirits to me. All of us were involved in heading our own productions, none of which was a blockbuster by any standard of our respective media. We all had day jobs and supported our creative projects on the side. Yet, all of us called all the shots and were quite proud of the work we were doing. I felt comfortable enough while talking to them to do something I had never done before. After fumbling out a question and seeing the quizzical looks on their faces, I put up my hands and said “That was really dumb—don't answer that and let's just move on.” Bear in mind that this interview was going out live and that couldn't be edited out later on. It was a funny moment, and much better than making them struggle with a half-formed idea.

This interview is also the only one that an interviewee ever transcribed. Chris typed it up for use in a British writing magazine. I never was quite sure if it was published or not, but I was delighted to get another transcript to use without having to go through the awful Herculean effort of transcription. Before I picked up one of those dictation machines with the foot-pedals for $10 at a garage sale, I used to transcribe by repeatedly rewinding the tape on a boombox that was sitting on my desk. That, in itself, was unpleasant enough to prevent me from ever transcribing another one. Thank god for stumbling across that machine.

Both of these magazines are worth seeking out. There is information about them in the reference section following the interview.

This interview was recorded at the WREK studios in Atlanta, Georgia in May 1994. The transcription and initial editing was done by Chris Reed.

Chris Reed (CR): Back Brain Recluse is the full title of the magazine, but it's usually abbreviated to BBR. (Don't ask me where it came from—there's probably something to do with a Mike Moorcock song for Hawkwind in there.) The easiest peg to hang it on is the weirder end of science fiction and fantasy, but we don't really like to pigeonhole it too much. If it's not really too commercial but it's good writing then we're interested in seeing it.

Ann Kennedy (AK): Well, the Silver Web basically tries to publish the kind of fiction that is too bizarre to fit into mainstream but that doesn't fit the standard traditional genre. I've been doing it since about 1989.

DS: Okay, and how long has BBR been around?

CR: It's been going since 1984.

DS: Now why did the two of you start doing these magazines in the first place? That seems to be a large jump from ‘I really like to read fiction, I'm not seeing all the fiction I like to see’ to ‘let's put out a magazine'—what caused that jump?

CR: You start with ‘wouldn't it be great to start a magazine'. At the time I was working in a secondhand record store and an artist worked there too who was going to do the graphics side of it. When he lost interest I just carried it on. Once you start these sort of things they take over and get a life of their own, like a cuckoo in the nest they grow and all the time you're just working to keep feeding it, and it grows and grows and grows. So once you've made that step into ‘let's start a magazine’ it's up to you to decide *not* to put the brakes on at any point.

DS: Has that been your experience, Ann?

AK: That's pretty close. I had been reading a lot of small press publications and back in 1988 for some reason I just mentioned to a girlfriend of mine, ‘You know, we could do something like this'. Little did I know how much work was involved, but once you get started it's like Chris said it's hard to put on the brakes because you really love what you're doing and the people that you meet are the best people in the world.

DS: Before you started did you have a good focus of what you wanted to do or did you sort of hone that as you went?

AK: I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do—I know what I *didn't* want to do. As time has progressed, I think that my focus has gotten better and I've got a better idea of what it is I'm looking for. In the beginning it was pretty much ‘let's see what's out there'.

CR: I don't even have a particular focus now. If you were to ask me what sort of stuff am I looking for, I couldn't tell you, because I don't know it until I see it. So yes, the editorial focus in terms of the quality of writing has been more defined, but it's still down to if I like it, and I like it enough, then it goes in the magazine. And at the moment it tends to be the weirder end of speculative fiction. I don't advertise BBR as a magazine of the surreal or science fiction or whatever, it's just a fiction magazine.

DS: Now when you first started doing this and you dipped into the well of unpublished fiction that was out there, did you find any surprises versus what you expected or did you even have any preconceived notions of what sort of fiction you would see from people?

CR: It was a great leap into the unknown. Unlike Ann I hadn't been seeing any small press magazines at all, we had one mass-market magazine in England at that time called Interzone and that was really the only benchmark that I had. When I started the magazine I was trading predominantly with music fanzines, so it wasn't until several years later that I started mixing with more traditional genre publishers.

AK: I think one of the things that surprised me—more now than in the beginning—is that there is an awful lot of really good fiction out there that's not being picked up by the bigger magazines, and that's where my magazine comes in. I do get a lot of the same old thing in my slush pile, but I come across some incredible writing sometimes from people that have never been published before, and I say to myself, ‘How come the big magazines don't know about these people?’

DS: Is it more a matter that they have a specific slant that it just missed or is there just more good fiction than people can get to—why do you suppose that things like this fall through the cracks?

CR: Because you can't fit it in a nice neat pigeonhole. The commercial publishers are looking for ‘in the classic tradition of Tolkien’ or ‘the classic tradition of Catherine Cookson'. It's easy to market and it's minimum effort with maximum profit. Whereas the sort of stuff that Ann and I like can't be defined like that, it's difficult to market, therefore they can't work out how much profit they're going to make on it, therefore they don't touch it. That doesn't stop people wanting to write it or read it, so it falls to the more specialist or smaller publishers who've got smaller overheads and no ten-storey office block to maintain. Just because people can't find it in a high-street bookstore doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, and certainly as publishing's becoming more and more commercialised then there's an increasing need for publishers like us to do what we're doing.

AK: The big publishers don't want to take chances with something new and they're only going to put out what they already know will sell. That's why when one vampire novel made it really big everyone's doing vampire novels all of a sudden and everyone's selling vampire novels and that's what you're seeing everywhere. You see the same thing on regular prime time TV, all the shows are the same. Very rarely do you come across something that's different and when a new show comes along that *is* different then everybody jumps on that and then all the shows are the same again.

DS: Working in small presses do you have any antipathy for the large presses, is there an ‘us versus them’ mentality or is it different edges of the same field?

AK: I don't think that there's an us versus them mentality. I sometimes feel that I have a great deal more freedom than they do because I don't have to play any of the political games that they do and I don't have to worry about whether or not this will sell or that will sell because my kids are still gonna eat—I have a day job. Their goal is business and my goal is I want to put some really good stuff out there to show to other people.

CR: We're not competing for the same market. They're dealing with the people that want more of the same, we're dealing with the people who want something different every time, so we complement each other, and yeah, it might be that some of the small presses grow bigger and increase in stature and start competing with the bigger presses, but I think that's a natural progression. You get the same in the music business—some of the indie labels get bigger when they suddenly find someone who hits the big time and they grow with them.

DS: Between the two of you, you've been doing this for nearly 20 years. There've got to be ups and downs and really good times and really lean tough times—how do you keep your intensity for five or ten years of doing this sort of thing?

CR: Because it's something that we're doing for pleasure in our spare time. We tried a rigid monthly schedule when we had newsstand distribution for a while and it wasn't working because we ended up compromising the way we were approaching the job. So now I put in the magazine that the next issue will be out when it's ready, and that way we keep the freshness and keep the interest. When it didn't work out on the newsstands in England for us, it was a heavy blow, but we still had the day job so it let us bounce back a lot easier. So things will carry on, they might be a bit leaner, but they carry on.

AK: Well, the thing that keeps me going through the bad times and the lulls is the people. Whether they be the readers or the contributors or the artists, I get an awful lot of very positive mail. I get submitters who I've rejected writing me thank you notes, things like that, people just sending me letters of support—'I believe in you, I like what you're doing, keep it coming'—and that's what keeps me going.

DS: Does there ever come a time now when you come home from work and you sit down and you think, ‘Oh God, please, not another bag of mail, oh, what have I done?’ [all laugh]

CR: I think Ann suffers from that more than I do in that respect.

AK: I get about 15 to 20 submissions a day, and I sit down and work on the mail every single night. If I miss a night there's just that much more, and it can be a snowball effect. But it's also the thing I look forward to when I get home every day because there's usually something nice in there.

DS: What would you say are the best and the worst things that you've come to get out of this? Start with the best—what really makes your day when you're doing this as you are?

CR: People pick up the magazine and say, ‘It doesn't look like a science fiction magazine', and I say, ‘That's because it isn't'. People don't know how to cope with it, they just hold it in their hands and look at it. It makes an impression on them, and as Ann said you get the people writing in saying, ‘I'm really looking forward to the new issue’ or, when you've just put one out they're saying, ‘Why does it have to be so long until the next one?’ (Ann chuckles). So it's things like that. You send it out to them and wait for the response—that's just great, it's a buzz.

AK: That's a big high. That's like a shot in the arm when someone says, ‘Thanks, this is great, I love it'.

DS: Now what's the bottom of it, what really drags you down and makes you question your continued sanity for carrying on?

CR: I think it's gone beyond that. We're both well into double figures in terms of the number of issues that we've published, and by this stage we've got enough self-belief in what we're doing. So yes, you might get somebody writing in with an angry letter saying there's not enough British contributors to BBR or something like that, and you think, ‘So what?’ We're doing what *we* believe in, we're being true to ourselves, and there's enough people who *do* like it that we can ... we don't aim to please everybody, anyone who thinks that is missing the point. So long as *someone* has been pleased by something in the magazine—some people might like one story, some people might prefer another—that's fine by me.

AK: I think that probably one of my biggest frustrations is not being able to do more, there's a lot of other things I'd like to do. I'd like to start publishing chapbooks, or limited edition books—I just don't have the time and money at this point. So sometimes that can be frustrating, not being able to advertise as much as I'd like to, or other things, such as full colour covers.

DS: Now, a lot of small press magazines start, and even in the last year I've seen a lot either announce, make calls for submissions and then never put out an issue, put out one issue and fold. Having gone as long as you have, what are you doing differently—is there something special about the two of you that you've been able to maintain it?

CR: It's no different from writers starting out. They're learning how to write, how to submit, how to deal with editors, how to polish their craft. When most small press editors start out they've no experience of assessing manuscripts, laying out a magazine, marketing the product, or anything like that. We're all learning our trade as editors as we go along—we haven't been to university and done degrees in publishing or anything like that. So it's learn as you go along. Some people who try to be editors find that it's not as fun as they thought it was going to be, and get distracted by other interests. It's no different from writers starting out and sending out manuscripts and then we never hear from them again.

AK: I think one of the reasons why I'm still doing it is because I take it very slowly one step at a time. I've seen a lot of magazines that burst out on to the scene first issue and they're absolutely beautiful and they've spent a lot of money on it and that's it, they've run out of steam. I started small and each issue I do gets better and better.

DS: One of the things the small presses are known for and especially the small presses in this genre is that you're pretty friendly to new writers, people at the beginning of their career. Each of you have published a fair number of newer writers—as these people come along do you feel a little proprietary about their success, do you sometimes feel a little jealous with them, ‘That's one of *my* writers there'?

AK: No—I feel *proud*, I don't feel proprietary. When I see a writer who I've seen grow and change and expand as they've gone on their career I just think it's wonderful and I take a great sense of pride in the fact that I published some of their earlier work.

DS: Did you publish Yvonne Navarro's first fiction?

AK: I published a story of hers in the first issue, and it was actually the first story I had ever *bought*, and it so impressed me that I even dreamed about it, and when I wrote her back accepting it, I said, ‘You ought to make this into a novel'. She did make it into a novel and she sold it, she got a three-book deal, and it was just the most wonderful thing in the world for me, and I was *very* happy for her.

CR: The only book that we've put out as a press was by an English writer called Simon Clark, and he's now managed to get himself a two-book deal. So it's nice to know that the people you're believing in are reaping the benefits, and, hopefully, we've given these people a chance to hone their art by giving them a forum.

DS: Now craft aside—because obviously a newer writer not having been at it you'd be able to see the seams a bit more—but thematically and content-wise what do you see different between an established writer and a newer writer? Does their fiction actually read differently?

CR: It depends on their influences. If you're lucky, you get someone who's not been reading in the genre or paying much attention to what's going on and they're just doing it naturally. Every so often you get someone arrive through the post that you've never heard of before, and they say, ‘I've just been doing some writing, thought you might like to see it', and they burn so brightly it's absolutely fantastic. You know you've got something *different*. Quite often though you find that the more well-known writers write more commercially, because they know what's made them successful, and, obviously, if they're professional they need to pay the bills so they're now working to a more commercial formula. It's very rare certainly in Britain that you'll find the commercial writers will be doing anything that the most appropriate place for it to be published would be in the small press.

AK: What's really interesting is in the next issue I'm putting together almost every single contributor is a new writer, it's either their first, second or third sale. That just happened by accident, I don't go out seeking new writers, and it's wonderful when something like that happens.

DS: What sort of things are on the horizon—are you going to be doing any more of the theme issues in the near future?

AK: Well I'm considering the possibility of doing a music issue, and it's going to be a very loose theme. I did a ‘bug’ issue a couple of years ago, and I guess it came off pretty well. I was inundated with tons and tons of ‘bug revenge’ stories and I don't ever want to be in that situation again. So if I do a theme issue, it'll be more by accident than by design.

DS: And what's in the future for Back Brain Recluse?

CR: We don't have a theme, we just use the previous issue as our benchmark for the next one and try and make it maybe a bit bigger, or maybe work on the design a bit more. We just take each issue as it comes.

DS: Okay, last question. Knowing what you do now, would you do it again?

CR & AK: Yes!

AK: Absolutely.

CR: No question about it, it's great.

I interviewed Jonathan Lethem at ArmadilloCon in Austin, Texas. It was the first and only time that I've been to that con or city. I really enjoyed it, but have just never had a chance to go back. This interview was one of a number of “pickup” interviews that I did. Rather than having them planned before I left, as I sometimes do in convention situations, I approached writers during the con to see if they would be willing to do an interview. This approach can be liberating sometimes because it lowers the overhead of getting everything set up. On the other hand, you might spend a lot of energy getting ready for an interview that someone doesn't want to do. In this case, it worked out well. I had already prepared for an interview with him years earlier, when Gun, with Occasional Music was first released. There was some last minute time conflict that I don't even remember, and the interview got cancelled late in the process, after I was already prepared. For this convention, I dusted off the old notes, got a copy of his newest book (which was a collection mostly of stories I had already read) and jumped into the fray.

Lucky for me, he was amenable to the interview. One of the things I like about the science fiction community is how loose it is. I approached the Guest of Honor (which Jonathan Lethem was here) in the hall and, within a few hours, was interviewing him. It didn't hurt that he remembered me from the earlier, aborted interview, but it still amazes me the level of access the rank and file have to the big shots of these conventions.

One of the panels that Lethem did this weekend was a presentation on the films of John Ford. I never got to attend that, but I did manage to work some of that discussion into this interview. I'm a big fan of westerns as a film genre. I am very sad to see them all but disappear in the last few decades. I'm also a fan of the classic movies from the 30's and 40's, which is some of the same material that has informed his writing.

This interview was recorded at the ArmadilloCon convention in Austin, Texas in October, 1996.

DS: Explain the title of your book The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye for the listeners.

JL: The title comes from a wonderful book by a poet and essayist named Geoffrey O'Brien from a book of his called The Phantom Empire, about films in the American imagination in the 20th century. He writes a real kind of poetic essay prose that's just brilliant, and the section I stole the title from was a description of the films of Fritz Lang. I'm a huge Fritz Lang fan and I think O'Brien got at the essence of what's brilliant about Fritz Lang and what's characteristic of him better than anyone I've ever read. The section is so poetic, and the images are so beautiful, I actually could have taken any one of a number of phrases and made them the title of this book. Lang's work, as O'Brien was pointing out, is very much concerned with enclosures and traps and architectural spaces and man dwarfed by his own kind of constructions and snared in his own nets. Lang's characters are all very much hunted, and that's a real theme running through the stories in this collection. So, “wall of the sky, wall of the eye” sort of caught that mood a little bit.

DS: Now, let's talk about the body of the stories that are in there. These were written over, say, about the last five years or so?

JL: Further back than that. The first was written in ‘89, and the collection's arranged almost exactly in chronological order; there's one cheat where I moved up a story but the first, “The Happy Man", is a sort of unpleasant horror story that I wrote that, for better or worse, was the thing that brought me my first attention. It kind of catapulted me into prominence. It was nominated for a Nebula Award when I was an unknown writer, so it wasn't on the strength of my name at all, it was really people responding to the story. For a long time that was kind of the story that defined my career for people. It's not what I'm completely happy about. It's a strange and kind of awful story, and, nonetheless, it was a given that it would be in the collection. It was still for many people their favorite thing that I've written, and I can't really deny its power. However, it doesn't represent everything that I think I can do, and so in a funny way the rest of the collection forms a sort of long argument about what I committed in “The Happy Man". I feel like every story is a different sort of compensation for the awfulness of that first story.

DS: Like a lot of people, that was the first of your work that I really became aware of your name on. It was, as you say, a very disturbing story, the imagery in it. Tell the people who might not be familiar with it a little about the story.

JL: The gimmick is that the main character has been brought back from death. The cost of this retrieval is that he is going to migrate mentally—he is going to make these mental journeys—to hell. Hell as conceived in the story is an absolutely individual, private experience—everyone has a different one. Every person who has been retrieved from death spends a little mental time in their private version of hell. The story alternates between his sort of real world existence as he tries to hold the tattered remnants of his family life together after this awful experience, and his mental visitations in hell.

DS: And part of the story is that when your mind is in hell, your body operates, but it's kind of like a soulless, sort of by-the-numbers, phoning-it-in type of living.

JL: Yeah, one of the most unpleasant things about the story is that he sticks around while his brain goes to hell. So he's sort of staggering through his family home, you know, perfunctorily eating and drinking and watching TV and his family has to live with this kind of zombie presence. That's probably the most unsettling thing in the whole story.

DS: And the thing that might be more unsettling is the fact that where you try to make a comment on the people that actually do live like this. I mean, there are people that basically live by the numbers.

JL: God, I think that that story or anything else I wrote where I was really trying to make some sort of ham-fisted comment on the way people live would probably be unreadable, but I'm lucky enough that it strikes me in rereading—and it's struck others—it ends up being a kind of parable or grotesque metaphor for a kind of dehumanized suburban rote existence. But you know, when you're writing, you're dealing with the specifics. You have your idea and you have your characters and you're driving at those points, and trying to make them work and make them rich, and if you're pontificating or generalizing it generally pulls the rug out from under the fictional intensity that you're striving for.

DS: It's one of the things now, as a new writer, you wrote this story. Now it wasn't the first of your stories published?

JL: No, I'd published three or four before that. I'm proud of them but nothing that I ended up reprinting in the collection. They were published quietly, in little magazines, small poetry magazines or small fiction magazines and I hadn't really received a lot of feedback or attention for them.

DS: As a new writer, when your first big publication like this receives the kind of acclaim that it did and receives the kind of critical talk, what does that do to you? I mean, at this point you're still just feeling your way around, and you're told you hit it big. It sort of sets the bar high and creates an expectation.

JL: Not that it won the Nobel prize or anything, but it gives you something to react against, for better or worse. I think it's a much more distressing or unnerving experience to have an early hit if you haven't written much else; especially if the next thing you publish isn't written yet. For me, I had the majority of my first novel written when the story came out and began getting that kind of attention and I had another dozen or so stories in various stages of construction. I wasn't “at sea” the way a writer might be if they'd had a success and suddenly had to match it and they didn't have anything else already in the drawer. I've been lucky that way all along. It took me a little while to break through, and so the down side is that you're frustrated and you're impatient for some attention, and not getting it. The positive end of that is that when you do find some success, your follow-up is right at hand. You've got something else ready. By the time my first book came out, I had two others mostly written, and that blunts the perils of being reviewed enormously—to know “Well, all right, however well or little you like this first one, I've got something else coming along that's just as good or better". You know, it'll all even out.

DS: Now, in the second story that's in the book, “Vanilla Dunk", now, as we're doing this interview there's a lot of controversy over sports stars -with Robby Alomar and others. “Vanilla Dunk” was written four or five years ago and very explicitly deals with a lot of these issues of superstars and what do we value in our sports stars?

JL: Well, the funny thing about “Vanilla Dunk” is that I wrote the story initially out of my frustration at my inability to write a story about rap music, which was really what I was getting at. I ended up sort of transmuting the pop music landscape into the sports landscape. For some reason I was able to get a handle on the material in that milieu. But “Vanilla Dunk” is a character. He's very much Elvis Presley or Brian Bosworth or Vanilla Ice—any one of a number of white entertainment figures—counting sports stars as entertainment figures—who appropriate that kind of black pizzazz and energy and go mainstream with it in a way that black stars rarely are able to. So I was metaphorizing the pop music landscape in the sports thing. Sports is, like a lot of things in American culture, so exaggerated, and the discourse around it is so cartoonish and garish and grotesque that it's pretty impossible to send up. I don't think I managed to satirize it, but maybe I inadvertently captured the flavor a bit. You know, you attempt to exaggerate and you end up right on the nose.

DS: At least thematically, that's one where if you draw the line down the protagonist and the antagonist, the more sincere the person, the more closer they are in the protagonistic end of the spectrum. The people who choose to disavow these augmentations in the end, those are the good guys. The guys who sort of buy into this crazed exaggeration—those are sort of the bad guys.

JL: Yeah, it's a bit of a corny story in that way. It's a real classic sports story. As a teenager I read a lot of kind of sports fiction for boys. There's an archetypal narrative that's also present in Ring Lardner's baseball fiction, where the narrator is this sort of undervalued player on the team and his best friend is the star. The story is ostensibly the narrator talking about the star, and somewhere in the course of it he discovers that he himself is very important to the team. I was echoing that kind of Ring Lardner “you know me, Al". Sports fiction is a hidden genre, and I'm as excited by those sort of tiny little fiction genres as I am by some of the big ones that I play with.

DS: Your work has a lot of the feel and window dressing of America in the Thirties and Forties in it, doesn't it?

JL: Well, it, it's something that snuck up on me. There's something thrilling to me, especially in post-war American culture. There's an energy, there's a kind of undermining of the traditional American male figure that really thrills me in the films of that period. You know, Jimmy Stewart's probably the key male figure in crisis in American film in the Fifties. Hitchcock and Anthony Mann put him through some really pretty tortuous paces in the thrillers and Westerns. Of course, I love a lot of hard-boiled fiction, too, and that's reflected in Gun With Occasional Music. In general, I think people in my generation are weirdly ahistorical. They've forgotten so much of the really vibrant stuff that just went before them in American culture. I guess Americans are pretty ahistorical. I shouldn't blame it on my generation. There are a lot of achievements that are lost, and suddenly, you've got to reinvent feminism, because we had an American feminism before. It's not a new thing, and there are a lot of epiphanies that are lost and then rediscovered. It's also just a sensibility thing. I'm in love with the tailoring of the suits in the Fifties. I'd like to live then, so, it's partly just fetishism.

DS: Now, we're roughly the same age, and, and I know I'm fascinated with AMC (American Movie Classics.) If I'm not watching anything in particular, I leave AMC on. One of the things that fascinates me about it is, in its own way, the cultural context and the way the movies were made and the times they're describing—they're farther removed from me than science fiction, A lot of science fiction still has a possibility for me, and there's no way I could possibly ever recapture this time period.

JL: Well, yes and no. What's always invisible is how mystical and rational and kind of time-bound and provincial the present is. The present always feels deceptively like it's very well realized and things have suddenly clarified and become modern at last. We're going to look awfully quaint and cute and bizarre and prejudiced and just strange. There are in films, for instance, there are actorly mannerisms that are characteristic of the 80's and 90's that are invisible to us. That looks like normal film acting and you watch AMC and you think, “Boy, those guys are mannered, and everything is so stylized.” There is contemporary stylizations; they're just invisible to you. So I'd argue that, in your way you're participating in a version of the kinds of things that you're saying you feel very distant from. I guess by going back and exploring some of the previous incarnations, I'm trying to get in touch with that. I'm trying to think about and feel and detect for myself the provincialisms and the stylizations in contemporary culture.

DS: Now, a lot of the current press nowadays talks about the same point that you're making about how a-historical people from their twenties to, say, early thirties are. Are we any more a-historical than anyone else has been, or is this a particular disjunction in our cultural history where we just no longer care about looking backwards?

JL: Oh boy, I don't know. I'm just not a historian. I'm winging it here, but I think Americans have a pretty strong ahistorical bent. It's a weird moment right now. It's kind of an area of opportunity for creative people. I think there's a lot of really radical retrieval projects out there to be done. Modernism is a great, weirdly kind of abandoned mansion that's really ripe to be retrieved and refurbished. We so frantically abandoned it in this postmodern—god I hate that word—there's a strange way in which historical consciousness is like a radical gesture right now. It's one of the more avant-garde things you can do, to be grounded in your cultural context.

DS: Now, at the point where you got the idea for, and you began working on, Gun With Occasional Music, what prompted the peculiar mix of the hard-boiled P.I., sort of dystopic—not necessarily dystopic future, but dystopic sideways present and past?

JL: Well, Gun With Occasional Music is typical of my work, and typical of some of the writers I admire. I'm obsessively literal. I'm always taking things that are under the surface and making them painfully specific and literal and prominent. I basically just exaggerated the classic hard-boiled novel into into a cartoon of itself. You know, Chandler's already a dystopian writer. Chandler's detective is a man out of time. He's a tarnished knight from a previous era walking through a modern California landscape that is kind of a 1984 dystopia. What I did was just turned around that corner where he's literally a man out of time, he's literally a time-traveler. Chandler was already writing dystopian fiction and I just created a cartoon version where all the subtlety has leeched out of it. You're forced to see those elements. People talk about science fiction writers like Gibson being “hard-boiled", and in a sense they are. I felt that there remained to be done a dystopian novel. You know, a really genuinely Chandlerian voice. There's a line of descent from Chandler, Ross MacDonald, James Crumley, that classic hard-boiled voice and the similes and the wisecracks. It is a living sub-sub-sub-genre, and I wanted to make an entry in the sub-genre. I wanted to write one of those. I didn't really think it had been done with a marriage to dystopian fiction, so I grabbed onto the available turf.

DS: I want to ask about one of the ideas that was in Gun, which is the idea of the sort of government-supplies drug state—state in the sense of the “pharmocracy". Where did that idea come from?

JL: You have to make a nod to Huxley, in Brave New World. I think with the drugs in that book I was actually writing as much about television as anything else. I don't really mean it to seem imposed by a malicious, tyrannical external government. The point of the book—and it's certainly my perception of the kinds of enslavements we live under in contemporary America—is that they're consensual, voluntary enslavements. We all invite the television into our homes, turn it on and willingly sit there. It's more than just a passive acceptance, it's a yearning for this kind of I.V. drip garbage supply. In another way I think I was thinking of alcohol. You know, the degree to which drunkenness is woven into everyday American life while other kinds of drug experiences are denounced and vilified is pretty damn bizarre. Any chance I can get to, I just poke a little fun at that.

DS: And you had mentioned raising the literalism was the forgetol basically, the P.I. trope of drinking to forget, without raising it to that level.

JL: Right. It's a tick almost at the level of like a Tourette's Syndrome where I can't leave something metaphorical. I've got to exaggerate it into the cartoon. The classic hard-boiled detective has been damaged by some woman in some psychic way. My hard-boiled detective literally had his manhood lopped off by the woman who burned him. The classic detective is tortured and attempts to forget. My detective literally takes a drug that erases his memory. Pretty much it's all traceable to the same instinct—to exaggerate into literalness the metaphoric or thematic subliminal elements.

DS: Now I want to ask you about something that you do with Wired magazine. Now clarify your role. Are you the host of the “Headspace"?

JL: Well, I should say first of all that I just quit that job. I founded a weekly talk show—if talk's the right word for it—online for Wired magazine. It was called “Headspace” and, basically, it was an hour every Tuesday night where I interviewed my buddies or writers I admired or people who I wanted to meet. The guests and I and anyone else who wanted to show up would sit at home at their keyboards and type in entries and they would appear in real time on the screen. It was a great and bizarre experience in that I felt almost like Ernie Kovacs. I was there at the founding of a new medium, and I was absolutely free to play because there were no rules and there were no precedents. It was also an awfully clunky and obtrusive medium and the technical deficiencies were mind-bendingly annoying. There were lots of shows where the program just crashed. It's certainly at this point so inconvenient that I think only a very hard core kind of computer fetishist would bother with it. But it was sort of thrilling to get to dabble in a medium that's just barely being born. I think some day it'll be looked on as the kind of comical founding days, the way the early days of television were sort of all weird pratfalls.

Transcribed by l.j. anderson, laurie@ecology.uga.edu

Elsewhere in this book, I discuss reading Michael Bishop's Brittle Innings and how much I liked that book. I had much the same reaction reading James Morrow's Towing Jehovah. I had the realization of its brilliance and marvelling at my fortune to be able to talk to the author. Moreover, these were two consecutive interviews in the spring of 1994. I realized then, and still realize, how damn lucking I am to be reading these books and talking to the authors.

I knew from the phone calls setting things up that James Morrow was a very nice guy. When the time came to actually do the interview, I was less nervous than I usually am. This was done in the era where I used two telephones to record the phone call. With one I would plug the handset cord into the tape deck, and on the other I would replace the handset mouthpiece with this crazy thing that screwed on the phone and made it a professional mike. This meant that the WREK studios would be a mess of phone wires as I ran an office phone across the joint into the small production studio. Despite the above ordinary level of technical troubles, knowing I would be shortly talking to James Morrow kept me calm. This didn't often happen, but my wife, Darlene, happened to be in this tiny room with me on this day. So that she could hear, I juryrigged a second set of headphones. I recall her being quite amused by Morrow's dry wit. She smiled a lot and tried not to laugh out loud. It was a fun afternoon.

A lot of what I liked about Towing Jehovah was the complexity of the characters. There was not one or two views on the death of God, but a dozen or more. Being apostate myself, I could appreciate the ambiguity and bittersweet feelings of realizing that a faith you have turned from was in fact the correct bet in the heavenly horse race. However, the horse came up lame and the race has been cancelled. I can't speak for the reactions of others, but this hit me right square where I live.

James Morrow has a very nice web page. The reference section for this interview has a link to it. He has the distinction of being the first author to link his web page to mine (as best I can tell such things.) When I first set up the Reality Break web pages in late 1994, the estimated size of the web was in the 50,000 page region. I scoured very hard looking for web resources for my guests so that I would have something to link to. At that time I had two links, a Robert Jordan fan page and Tom Maddox’ gopher site. Imagine my surprise when I found later that this very nice web page devoted to this very good writer was linking to one of my little pages. That's a good feeling.

This interview was recorded via telephone with James Morrow at his home in Pennsylvania in April 1994.

DS: Tell us a little about the book Towing Jehovah. The premise is such that I doubt I could do it justice. I'll allow you to have the honors.

JM: [laughs] Well, I guess this is what Hollywood would call high concept. It arrived in my mind as a very vivid image. I was casting around for an idea for a new novel and I saw the corpse of God, this gigantic dead body I guess out of death of God theology of the sort that's been around for the last couple decades. I saw this enormous body hooked up to a supertanker and I realized I had a unique variety of sea adventure here. This would be in the tradition of philosophical nautical sagas, but with a supertanker instead of a steamer or a sailing ship. This is probably the first science fiction novel to use God's corpse as its main prop and also is in that rare category of science fiction sea sagas.

DS: Where exactly did you come up with the nautical knowledge? Do you have any nautical background yourself?

JM: I grew up not too far from the Jersey shore and while my parents never had any money, they always seemed to have friends with cabin cruisers so I've had nautical summers and I'm sure there is an autobiographical element to the story. As I was writing it I also boned up by looking at Hollywood forays into this genre like Mutiny on the Bounty and Lord Jim. It's essentially, in some ways you could think of the novel as a remake of Conrad's Lord Jim. The captain of my supertanker is given an opportunity to redeem himself. There are parallels with the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska. My captain caused a horrendous spill in the Gulf of Mexico. An angel appears to him in the New York cloisters with the news that God is dead and he, Anthony van Horn—the captain, has been assigned to the burial detail, as it were. It's his job to transport this corpse out of the sea lane and up to the Arctic where it can have a respectful burial. When this occurs, the captain leaps upon the opportunity to redeem himself for the environmental disaster that he caused. Before we know it, we're on the ship, the Valparaso, and God's body is hooked to the stern and we are having this sea adventure, trying to get God to his tomb, trying to get God inside this enormous iceberg, out of which a crypt has been hollowed.

DS: You mentioned the parallel to the Exxon Valdez disaster. I've noticed that in basically every review, everyone has to mention that. Do you think that easy comparison hinder the story or help it by giving people a good jumping on place?

JM: I like to think that it anchors the book in reality. It's just a very overt swipe of the sort that Orson Welles did when he filmed Hearst's life as Citizen Kane. I just liked being able to play so explicitly off of this very famous disaster. I'm not pretending that it's original. In all of my novels, I've found it important to play the wild premise and the crazy fantasy elements off of factual detail. I do a lot of research into the nitty gritty of the subject. I think it's the only way to get away with the fantasy element, is if the technical things ring true. I did a lot of research into supertankers. A good friend of mine here in Pennsylvania has been an able bodied seaman on this big oil carriers and she was able to give me a lot of inside information. A number of books were coming out about the Valdez at the time that I was writing Towing Jehovah, so that was very convenient. Inadvertently, they dropped a lot of details that I was able to exploit about how these ships work and what it's like to be inside one of the actual tanks that's intended to hold the oil. I have a couple of characters cleaning one of those tanks out at one point in the story, and it figures in the plot.

DS: One of the things that this genre is very concerned with is the whole idea of the sense of wonder. From your book, I got the feeling that when you've got a ship like this, this ultra large crude carrier, you don't need a science fictional element to get the sense of wonder. These things are huge and magnificent.

JM: Exactly. I was amazed and pleasantly surprised by the fit between the agenda of science fiction and supertankers. I don't think there's been a previous science fiction supertanker story, but maybe I can start a new subgenre. On another level, it's really a spaceship, and then as Ray Bradbury has pointed out, that spaceships are really cities. That's part of the appeal of the huge space ark convention of so much SF, it's a microcosm of all of society. As with Moby Dick, not to elevate the book with too lofty a comparison , my supertanker becomes the whole world, in a sense. It becomes human society and the problems on the ship are the problems that humanity, in general, faces or would face if confronted with the fact of God's death.

DS: In another sense the book, as it deals with adventure epic part of towing the body up there, it has the hard SF structure as everyone deals with the engineering problems and the mechanics of towing God.

JM: It took me a while to figure out exactly what the logistics would be, and some of the readers of the manuscript said “Oh, you don't need to go into that. Just say, ‘they hooked chains to God and then they were off!'” My instinct was to take it in the other direction, and to be very explicit about how you would accomplish this tow. I ended up with the captain retrofitting some huge winches to the back of the ship and chains are wound around the drums and there are anchors on the ends of the chains and these anchors are hauled underwater by scuba divers out to God's ears and they swim inside the ears, because the ears are submerged a little, and they find the tiny bones inside anyone's ears, and of course these are God scale bones so this huge anchor hooks over one of the bones. I had to learn a little bit of anatomy and a fair amount of supertanker lore.

DS: Let's talk about the range of characters in the book. The various people who actually make it on to the ship have a large variety of religious viewpoints, from the priests and van Horn to a former Rabbinical student and so on.

JM: It's all sort of consciously schematic. I tried to make the characters real and have their own little existential quirks, but the big idea I'm playing with is sort of like the old Hindu story called The Blind Man and the Elephant. A bunch of blind men approach the same elephant and they each touch a different part of the elephant's anatomy. They reach different conclusions about what type of beast an elephant is. One will grab the tail is very much like a snake, and someone will touch the trunk and decide that the elephant is like a rope, and someone will touch its side and say that the elephant is like a wall, and somebody runs into the tusk and decides that the elephant is like a spear. I do the same thing with the body of God. When the believers encounter it they are scandalized and depressed and terrified. Most of the crewmen have conventional Judeo-Christian beliefs and then I contrive to put a feminist on board and for her this corpse is really bad news because it seems to validate the whole patriarchal religious interpretation of reality, that God is male and is sort of a fearsome bearded figure whom one must obey before anything else. Some atheists get wind of the tragedy and they filter it through their viewpoint. If you think about it, the death of God is every bit as upsetting to atheists as it would be for believers because it invalidates their viewpoint as well. If God once did exist then atheism is not a sensible interpretation of reality either. Everybody interprets the corpse through their own ideology and it's like a Rorschach test. It was fun, as often happens with sea sagas, to have lots of different people on the ship with very diverse backgrounds and competing arguments about how the universe works.

DS: How long have you been writing, and how long have you been writing science fiction? Did they happen at the same time?

JM: That's a good question. I suppose there are a couple of different ways to answer it. In a sense, I've been writing my whole verbal life. I've got a story I wrote at age seven. It's divided into chapters, so maybe I should call it a novella. When I was six and seven I would make up stories in my head and I would pace around the dining room, dictating the stories to my mother who would dutifully transcribe them with her old manual typewriter. This was in the years before word processors. It was called “The story of the Dog Family” and had these talking dogs in it. Each chapter was maybe three sentences long, but I loved the idea of dividing a story into chapters. I though that was great. Since it was talking dogs, I suppose it would be considered science fiction. I never developed the addiction to science fiction literature that a lot of kids do as they grow up. I was a great movie fan and I loved narrative in general and read most of the children's classics, but had no special for SF. I would read the stuff most kids run across like The Time Machine and War of the Worlds. I came to the field late. I taught for many years, and I assumed that my career would be in education. I got burned out at that, and found myself in possession of an idea for a novel that was set on another planet. I said to myself “Well, this must be science fiction. I guess I am destined to write about the impossible or the improbable, after all.” [laughs] I think in some ways it was good that I didn't consciously prepare myself for such a career and steep myself only in the literature of science fiction has given me a bit of perspective. I come at it more out of a desperate desire to get certain themes and ideas across than out of any wish to just participate in the culture of SF. To this day, I confess I don't read very much of it. Most of what I read is mainstream. I certainly respect the good works that have been done by many of my colleagues, but I only wrote the novel because I had something I really wanted to say. Violence was the theme, is violence a necessary part of the human character? I was fascinated with that philosophical question. I probably came to it more as an educator and someone who was interested in psychology in his first career as a teacher, than as someone with any particular love of SF.

DS: A major theme of your work is theological—in this novel, and in Only Begotten Daughter and your “Bible Stories for Adults” series of short works. Do you have any formal theological training or is this just a theme that concerns you very much?

JM: No, almost the opposite. I had very little by way of a religious upbringing. Maybe I'm trying to compensate for that by chasing God through the pages of my fiction. A lot of people are surprised to find out that I'm not an angry lapsed Catholic and that I was never assaulted by a nun with a ruler. Even though there is a lot of bitterness and irreverence in Only Begotten Daughter, I like to think of it as mostly theological speculation. I love the big questions and I love the way the transfixion enables one to play with the big questions and not be embarrassed by it. I think the mainstream long ago gave up on novels that dealt directly with philosophical riddles. It seems like most of the contemporary literature you read is about the author's ethnic heritage or divorce or something. These are interesting enough subjects but there are other things happening in the cosmos. I had a generic Presbyterian upbringing. My parents took me to Sunday School, but they had not particular convictions themselves. They had a a sort of inoculation theory of religion. I ought to get a little bit of it, because otherwise I might one day leap into a cult. [laughs] I have to say that much of religion bewilders and angers me. At one level I don't get it, and that's why I keep exploring it. It seems to me that the reality that I hear religious people describe is not reality as I experience it, and that gap fascinates me. I'm always going to be worrying about that problem. I really don't understand why people subscribe to particular creeds that for me fly in the face of what we know about the universe. Which is not to say we know a great deal, we are quite ignorant about it as Lewis Thomas would say.

DS: Part of the nature of your work, more so in the longer work, is a very satirical outlook. You present some rather absurd situations and some rather absurd characters. Is it easy to lose control of absurdity?

JM: I suppose there is always a danger of a premise so extreme that it is simply dismissed by the reader who says “This couldn't possibly happen, so why should I take any interest in it?” I think if you do your homework, you can bring it off. It's a matter of eventually coming to believe your own unbelievable premise. The people for whom Towing Jehovah works, take it seriously. They have to think through their own image of God and then compare it to this sort of overtly cartoonish image of God—this old man with a beard out of the Sistine Chapel painting by Michelangelo. I'm inviting the reader to do that, and I'm very serious in that invitation. Satire is deadly serious. It's not to be confused with burlesque or parody or Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy or anything for a laugh mode. It's a very angry mode, and very consistent in what it is trying to say. There is always that risk of it being unbelievable and the reader saying “I much prefer contemporary mainstream fiction and its commitment to reality, the mimetic.” If I do a lot of research and get certain technical details right, details about piloting ships and how supertankers work, I think I can win the reader over.

DS: Of the wide variety of viewpoints and outlooks for the characters in Towing Jehovah, are there any particular that are closer to yours, or are all the viewpoints yours?

JM: There's a little bit of me in each character. My previous novel, Only Begotten Daughter, about Jesus Christ's divine half-sister, was kind of autobiographical. Her confusion about whether God exists and what God expects of us, what we have the right to expect of God, is essentially my own confusion. In Towing Jehovah, I guess the militant agnostic humanist feminist is maybe closest in some ways to my own sympathies. Oddly, it's a female alter-ego for me. There's much of the captain and his obsession with his own failure in me. I like to torment myself, mostly at the level of my books never seeming very good to me. I'm very guilty of that. I think that my world view remains essentially skeptical, and that's embodied in Cassie Fowler. She is not part of the crew, she is rescued as a castaway. She has been on a trip that recapitulates Darwin's voyage to the Galapagos and the ship is sunk in a hurricane, and she manages to climb aboard a coral reef and send out a distress signal. That's how I got her on the ship and she causes a lot of disruption.

DS: I did also notice that Cassie Fowler has worked as a playwright, and that she has written a play that sounds suspiciously like something you might have written. She wrote a “Bible Stories for Adults” play.

JM: I give her credit for some of my short stories. [laughs] I made her into a playwright because I want her to have a foot in the humanist camp as well, but she is also a biologist. She is maybe vaguely like Robert Ardry. I should also mention the priest, Thomas Occam, has part of me in him as well. I very much respect the sort of believer who is very curious about scientific understandings of reality and gives them their due, instead of this awful problem we have now of the fundamentalist obsession with the biblical interpretation of what are really questions that I think science has a much better handle on. This idolatry vis a vis the Bible drives me absolutely nuts. Occam is based on maybe Killal de Chardin or maybe Stanley Jacqui or any number of these Catholic scientists—a fascinating breed of human being.

DS: You also edit the Nebula Awards anthologies.

JM: I'm just finishing up that stint. I did the last three, 26 through 28, and I had to anthologize my own novella in the last one, “City of Truth.” I don't think that's a vocation I will stick with. I didn't enjoy being an editor. You make a lot of enemies, you annoy the writers whose work you can't include in the book. I thought I'd give it a try, but it's not me. It's really a different set of skills than constructing fiction.

DS: Was it awkward having to include your own work?

JM: [laughs] I think it would have been if it hadn't been the winner. There have been situations where editors of Nebula anthologies have put in stories that have been runners up and what can I say? I suppose it is psychologically healthy to admire own's own work, but it raises a few eyebrows. I had no choice, Dave! The novella won the award, and so I had to anthologize it. [laughs]

I carved out a piece of Towing Jehovah, and just recently published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. One of Cassie Fowler's plays was at one point was reproduced in toto in the manuscript, and then I realized it was throwing the pace off. I removed it from the novel—or most of it, I left a couple of pages of it—and then published it. I've been working on the sequel to Towing Jehovah, so that's been keeping me from getting much short fiction written.

Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the higher profile authors that I've interviewed, especially for as many times as he has been on the show. This interview is the first I did with him, between Red Mars and Green Mars. I also ended up interviewing him on both Blue Mars and Antarctica. There was something special about this first one, though. It was arranged with the help of Professor Bud Foote at Georgia Tech. Robinson was doing some guest lectures at the school, and whilst in town was doing some other publicity things, like signings. At a signing at The Science Fiction and Mystery Bookshop, Bud Foote helped negotiate a time and place to do the interview, which turned out to be in his home office. I remember that they first wanted me to do the interview in the afternoon. When I said I couldn't, because I had a day job, Robinson said with all sincerity “Oh, I'm very sorry. How terrible for you.”

Years later, we would meet again in person at the Powell's in Beaverton, Oregon for the Antarctica tour. We were supposed to go back to my home studio and do an interview with me returning him in time to for his signing, but late flights and snafus stood in the way. Still, he was as pleasant and personable in the midst of this chaos as he was in Bud Foote's living room.

The thing I like best about Robinson and his work is that I can see it having the same influence on the teens of today (and tomorrow) that the Isaac Asimov and Ted Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison stories I read had on me. It gives them a place to escape and to think beyond their time and place, to let their imaginations run free. I think that's a good thing, and I'm glad I got to be a part of it.

This interview was conducted at the home of Professor Bud Foote in Atlanta, Georgia in March, 1994.

DS: You are in town [Atlanta] speaking to Georgia Tech students and talking about your new book Green Mars.

KSR: That's right. Professor Bud Foote has invited me as part of the Literature, Communications and Culture program [of Georgia Tech] so I am here to talk to some classes and give a speech and do some signings at the local bookstores. It's associated with Green Mars coming out now, but it just happened to be at this time. I enjoy coming out here. The students are interesting. I'm a science groupie myself. I was not trained as a scientist but I'm married to one and I'm very interested in the whole process of science. I like to meet with students and talk with them. Also, I used to be a college teacher and I'm not anymore, so I come back to Georgia Tech to get a flashback of the good parts of teaching without having to grade papers. It's wonderful.

DS: Mars is the current series that you are working on. When you began it, it was before the current Mars craze had hit. What do you make of that? Why do you suppose that Mars has become a hot topic recently?

KSR: I'm kind of mystified about it, to tell you the truth. I've been asked the question before because in the last couple of years at least fifteen science fiction novels set on Mars have come out all at once. Everyone has noticed that there is this trend, but no one knows what it means. Neither do I, but it does occur to me that it was 1976 when Viking landed on Mars and gave us a gigantic amount of data. Maybe it has just taken this long for science fiction writers to process that data and figure out what it might mean, what stories you might tell about it, and actually realize the enormous potential for storytelling. I think it's just a coincidence partly, and that it takes that long to process the fact of the new world, which is more or less what we have been given by the Viking and Mariner missions.

DS: Before beginning Red Mars, you've written about Mars a few times, in “Green Mars", originally a short story and the like. What interests you personally in writing about Mars as a subject?

KSR: The thing that first drew me to it in these early stories was the landscapes that I saw on the photographs that were sent back by Mariner and Viking. A lot of the Viking photos were taken stereo optically, by two cameras or by one camera in two different positions, so that you could look through a viewer and get a sense of it in three dimensions. I saw some tremendous landscapes. Incredibly tall cliffs, giant volcanoes, enormous canyons as long as the United States is wide.

I'm a backpacker. I really love the time I spend in the high mountains and in the deserts of the American West. It occurred to me from the first look at these photographs that what we had here was an entire world made up of mountains and deserts of the kind that I really enjoy. I like bare rock. So I got interested in Mars at first just because of the potential for backpacking—which is silly, but that's how these things come about. The more I began to think about it the more I began to think that this process of terraforming, of transforming Mars’ atmosphere and giving it a biosphere is simply an astonishing idea and it is a new idea in history.

Until 1976 we didn't know enough about Mars to know whether it was possible or not. If Mars had turned out to be as dry as the moon, there wouldn't have been enough water to make a biosphere, and that would have scotched the plan right from the start. Now we know that there is a lot of water on Mars in permafrost form, and it's possible to terraform it. That is a physical possibility, not theoretical. Between the combination of what we know about it and what we know about our own technology, we can do the equations. The times involve vary, depending on how optimistic the scientists are about the technology involved. The shortest estimate I've ever seen has been 50 years but that is kind of an extremist judgement. More typically it would be somewhere between a few thousand years and about 20,000 years. Some at the long end of the scale talk about 100,000 years which is awfully long. If you are only talking about 1000 years then it is within the scale of possibility because we would be seeing progress all a long the way. Terraforming is a real possibility. There is only one biosphere that we know of, Earth, and there are probably millions of Earths throughout the universe but we can't get to any of them. Mars is basically right next door. It is possible that we could introduce a biosphere there that would then begin to self organize and become its own place and that's simply a tremendously exciting possibility to me.

DS: Your book Red Mars is concerned with the ethical conflicts of terraforming, the responsibility that you have to leave as it was versus the pragmatic need to have the planet terraformed. Is part of this superimposing our environmental concerns of today onto Mars of the future?

KSR: Yes, exactly. I think it is a nice way of thinking about our own environmental movement and figuring out what it is about our environment that we really value. People talk about the land ethic when they talk about environmentalism. The phrase comes from Aldo Leopold and the notion that what is good for humanity is what is good for the land . People who would advocate the terraforming of Mars would say that when he says the land he doesn't mean the rock, he means the bacteria and the life forms at all scales that exist bonded into the land and on top of the land. What he means by the land is the biosphere. I'm not so sure that's what Aldo Leopold meant. I think he may have included rock amongst the things that we need to grant intrinsic worth and to take care of, but in any case it makes you think about what it is in nature that we love. Is it the simple fact of geology and rock or is it life itself that we are talking about?

In Mars you get to think about these issues explicitly because the Mars that's already there is obviously a beautiful place and it has its own intrinsic worth. It is a spectacular, awesome place. Terraforming it would wreck some features. Introduction of water would immediately begin to tear apart a very arid surface, and chemical reactions that had never happened before would happen instantly. The soil would practically boil. It would change Mars dramatically. If people were committed to the rock of Mars and its intrinsic worth as it is right now, they would be violently opposed to terraforming Mars. I would be violently opposed if someone came to California and said “Let's irrigate Death Valley. We can make this into a pretty place and have forests all over the American West.” Perhaps you could, but I would be very offended because I love the American desert the way it is. Certainly in that first group of Martian colonists there are going to be some humans who are going to fall in love with Mars the way it is. They will resist the process of terraformation. I have sympathy for that in a way, because of the analogy to Death Valley and the American deserts.

I teeter-totter back and forth between being attracted and appalled by the idea and it is that that has given me the energy to take on this real big book. I keep on teeter-totering back and forth and I can speak with conviction from the characters various points of views because I myself am so conflicted about it. I think it helps as a novelist even though it doesn't help me to be a coherent human being.

DS: Is that one of the reasons why you chose the narrative structure where you have rotating viewpoints amongst the first 100 colonists—so that you can look at each side of the question and you can be each person with each belief?

KSR: Yes, exactly. The story I wanted to tell was bigger than any one character point of view could contain. I wanted to express with conviction the different points of view that are going to exist there. I constructed it so that each chapter of the novel is from a different character's point of view although some of them come back occasionally and there are some repetitions. These characters have strongly divergent beliefs and while I was writing that chapter I just tried to throw myself completely into their mind set and understand them as well as I could. I have this ambivalence. Ambivalence for a novelist is not necessarily a bad thing because it supports the kind of thing that you are trying to do, which is to understand different points of view fully. Not just to be a preacher, but to be someone who presents the whole array of human opinions.

DS: With many novels of this type, the engineering concerns often outweigh other concerns in the book. In your book, the characters and the sociopolitical scheme overrides the engineering problems. Are you more interested in the politics than the actual breaking of the rocks?

KSR: I'm interested in all of it, but it seems to me that the engineering, although complicated, is relatively straightforward and it's not as perplexing as the task of setting up a human colony there. Because if humans go to Mars, then they will bring along all of there cultural baggage. All of their various beliefs and ideologies are going to come into conflict. Even though they will be setting up a new society, they will have a lot of patterns of thought and behavior from the old society that will be carried along with them. Some of those are destructive to any environment and don't make any sense, and just happen to be holdover traditions that we haven't managed to escape. Others are absolutely useful and necessary, but sorting out which is which is going to be a matter of conflict, particularly since this is not going to be a single nation effort. It will be an international, multicultural effort so all of the problems that we have on Earth I'm afraid will get transferred to Mars. The thing that I think is interesting about that is that in effect it will become a microcosm situation. Oftentimes, when you get small enough international groups, differences tend to fade away and people tend to cooperate. I'm thinking of scientific expeditions to Antarctica and other international cooperative ventures that have been small scale. Everyone realized that all humans are humans and that individuals begin to bond as individuals and their cultural differences begin to fall away. I see the possibility for Mars to develop a multicultural situation that is relatively peaceful but it seem to me that it will be a struggle to get there. That's not a bad thing for a novelist, because the struggle is what novels are about.

DS: With Mars you have the frontier analogy, and you emphasize that by having one of the main characters named “John Boone” and in the path-breaking, frontiersman role. Was that a conscious effort of yours?

KSR: It is a frontier situation, and the first man on Mars is an American astronaut in the classic American mold. The name “John Boone” has echoes of Daniel Boone and John Glenn and any number of other plain, all-American names, and seemed to me to remind people of what this character is. Sometimes I think that choices as to who would be the first are sometimes made on peculiar, irrational beliefs. Neil Armstrong is an awfully solid American name compared to Buzz Aldrin and it's crazy but it may not be a coincidence that Armstrong was the one that ended up being chosen to be first. I don't think that it's altogether unlikely that a guy with a real classic name might end up being the one chosen.

DS: Anytime that you have earth expanding beyond it's boundaries, you've got all of the problems of an empire. Do you think that there is any way to avoid these problems or is any colony doomed to the same situations we've seen throughout history?

KSR: I think there probably is going to be always a propensity for the people back home to think of the colony or the expedition as an extension of themselves. We sent these people to Mars, they're from Earth, they've been sent out there to do a job and so they've got to do that job. If you send people there, when they stay long enough and if they have kids, very quickly they will begin to develop local loyalties. “Don't tell us what to do, we are a free people.” I think that there is in fact an almost natural tendency for people to go through that sequence. The only question is, how quickly will the home empire get it, that they can't control colonies at a distance. It's impossible even on Earth, and with another plant that is nine months distant, the logistics of it just make it impossible. That's not to say that people will admit that right away.

DS: I thought it was very interesting in the book when you discussed the selection process for who would actually go on the mission. Simultaneously, they are trying to select for contradictory attitudes and qualities in this people.

KSR: I described it as being a gigantic list of double binds. They were asking people to be extraordinarily talented but also extremely sociable, so there is a lot of contradictions in what the people to be selected are asked. They would know that or at least be aware of it on some level. I'm sure that would create tremendous anxiety because on the one hand they are asked to be brilliant and on the other they are asked to be congenial. That's a hard combination for anyone to encompass in a single personality. My feeling is that the people who get selected will be good at dissembling, at hiding parts of themselves, and at playing the part of a mellow, congenial person. There might be quite a few people who would get on board having played that part when it wasn't really their true nature. Once they got to Mars, there would be no reason for them to continue to behave that way and then we would get the full array of human eccentricity.

DS: This series, by the time it reaches the end, will be the largest continued narrative of your career. Going into the first book, did you realize that it was going to be such a big story?

KSR: Sitting down and beginning to work on this project, I thought it would be one novel and that I would call it Green Mars, and I knew it would be a big book. I had the desire to write a real “bug crusher", as we call them, a book you could use as a doorstop with no problem. As soon as I began to work on it seriously, I realized that I wanted to give a lot of attention to many steps along the way. I wanted to go through the process of terraforming stage by stage so that there was a real feeling of authenticity about it, so that you might think it could really happen that way. At that point, I realized that it was even bigger than a “bug crusher.” It had to be a multi-volume thing, and publishers are real happy with multi-volume science fiction trilogies. They are a nice commercial item, so there was no protest when I said that this has to be more than one book.

DS: Does your attitude change, do you have to approach it differently knowing that rather than writing a lone book, you are committing several years of your life to this long story?

KSR: Yes. There's the technical challenge of making sure that the end of volume 1 and the end of volume 2 represent a satisfactory pause point. If it had been a single book, there would be no reason why there would have to be a satisfactory pause point at the 1/3 and 2/3 mark. When they are actual volumes that come out years apart I felt that it was very important to give a little bit of closure to each episode. I knew anyway that it would take a few years of my life, even as a single novel, and to tell you the truth, I've gotten real comfortable. People are so adaptable, and I've been working on it so long now that that it strikes me as a permanent condition of my existence. I'm not really thinking about product, just process. As far as I can tell by the way things feel, I'm going to be writing a Mars book forever and at this point I'm getting nervous about being done. It feels a little scary.

DS: Throughout your career you have been a critical success, and with these books you have broken out into large market. Is there a difference between a “writer's writer” and a “reader's writer?"

KSR: A writers’ writer implies that you are doing things tricky enough that only a sophisticated reader or another writer will notice them and that you might be doing things so trickily that a less experienced reader can't follow the story. I would never want the tag of a “writers’ writer.” I would rather be a reader's writer, and I'm very much committed to the notion of a straightforward surface to a story that contains some depth to it. It seems to me that when you get right down to it, what really makes literature interesting to us is not the tricks of the telling but is the actual content of it, the meaning that you are conveying. It is what you have to say more than how you say it, although it is important to be able to say it well. It's even more important that you have something to say at all. The fact that these books have been a bigger success compared to my earlier ones is just a great pleasure to me. I would hope that it would pull those earlier books back into the limelight a little bit. Those books are as straightforward in their style as anything, as the Mars books or anything else I have done, and I feel that maybe it has just taken a while to get known. It is a happy time in my career. I feel that my readership is growing very fast right now and that's real satisfying because when I think about it (although I try not to) it's been twenty years since I started writing.

DS: One reviewer said of you that your work isn't escapism, that it sends you straight into conflict with yourself. Do you think that's an accurate statement? Do you think of your work as provocative?

KSR: I'm not interested in escapism. I would like to provide entertainment that also gives you food for thought. That's a classical notion of what literature is about, that it's there to educate or instruct as well as entertain. The entertainment should not be a sugar coating on a serious pill but the two should coexist as a single thing. If you do literature well enough, both happen at the same time. It is high entertainment, and the reason that it is high entertainment is that it is making you think so hard about your own life and about the real world. The books we know and love are the books that have given us that feeling. It should be tremendous fun, but partly the fun of recognition.

DS: I had not noticed this until doing the research for this interview, but someone also commented that your protagonists tend to be almost hyperactive, in that they are always busy. Have you ever picked that out of your work?

KSR: That's funny. It's probably true and it's because as a writer or as a storyteller I can't figure out what to talk about when they aren't busy. [laughs] That's probably a failing on my part. I should be able to think of something. You know, people have also criticized my work for having too much thought and not enough action. My feeling is that these two types of comments are at such odds with each other that I don't know what to take from them. It doesn't give me any useful information about what to do next. Business comes out of plot, and having too much thought comes from trying to indicate what's going on in my character's minds. I need both of these things, so I just have to keep on forging on.

DS: You've written the Orange County books and various other books which are dissimilar from what you are doing now. Do each of these books scratch a different itch?

KSR: Sure. I wrote three California novels that were set in my home area and were three different futures for my home area and the world at large. They were near future science fiction, where I was really absorbed in the problems of the next fifty years in Earth's history. It seems to me that science fiction that just skips over those next fifty years and assumes that everything will be all right is making a mistake because it is going to be a very problematic fifty years and interesting to write about. With the Mars books, the interest is specifically with Mars and the opportunity that it provides for terraforming. It does reflect back on our current situation, but it is also a kind of escape from our next fifty years and a chance to talk about landscape and the things that I love in a different way. They are different projects and I like to do something different every time out.

DS: As you write, I'm sure that you basically write for yourself, the work that you enjoy and the work that you want to do. What would you hope that a reader takes out of your work?

KSR: A whole host of things, really. I would hope that they would go back into the world and think that they see it a little bit differently and maybe with a little more depth, more of a sense of history—a sense that what we do now will have consequences for the generations to come. Also that there might be more of a sensuous surface to things, that because of reading my descriptions of landscape or of the natural world that they might notice it more when they go back out and see it in person. That would be a great thing to happen.

DS: Your work is very involved with a sense of history. Do you personally have a commitment to looking backward?

KSR: I have been fascinated by history for much longer than my interest in science fiction. One of the reasons that I like science fiction is that it is a very historical literature. It postulates events from the present to some fictional moment in the future, so it is always talking about historical processes. I'm interested very much in the history of my home area in California, and in general I find it fascinating to read about what humanity has done so far. That's the flip side of being fascinated with where humanity is going to go from here.

This interview with Michael Swanwick is the start of this whole eBook project in a way. It's not the first interview I ever did, but it was the first one I ever did with an eye to using it as a written transcript later. At the time we conducted this interview, I had been doing the show about a year. One little detail that never occurred to me when this project was in the daydreaming stages was the fiscal impact of doing an independent radio show. Although I did the show for WREK FM in Atlanta, I actually handled every bit of the production myself. I made all the calls, set everything up, did the publicity. As a result, I picked up almost all of the expenses of production. This was never a lot at one time, but after a few years the long distance calls, boxes of tapes every month, postage, photocopies and assorted stuff really start to add up.

Finally, I had the brilliant insight that I was doing an interview with a science fiction author about every week. There were also magazines I read that published interviews with science fiction authors, and I presumed they paid money for them. “Aha,” said I, “if I can find the magical link between these two truths, I can convert my interviews to money.” At least, that was my theory. In reality, I never cleared the hurdle between concept and action. I queried several publications including Science Fiction Chronicle and Atlanta's Creative Loafing with no luck. Later I learned that the secret is to ask them so many times they get physically exhuasted saying “no” and slip up once and say “yes.” I always learn this stuff too late.

Beyond this interview, I don't know much of Michael Swanwick's personal life. I know his writing well, having enjoyed his novels and his brilliant run of short work that continues to this writing. Not long ago, he had three of his short stories competing against each other for the Hugo, and thus won it. Ordinary writers don't have this happen to them. As for the man behind the words, I only know that he is generous to a fault. He's granted me permission to use this interview in various contexts over and over. He seems to have a lot of sympathy (or perhaps empathy) for the beginning writer trying to scratch a few nickels from some sentences here and there.

This is interview was conducted via telephone with Michael Swanwick in January, 1994.

DS: You live in Philadelphia. How did you make it through the storm this week?

MS: [laughs] We've spent the last three days chopping ice. I'm weary all over but otherwise unharmed.

DS: Tell us a little about your new novel, tell us about the plot and the style and tone.

MS: Iron Dragon's Daughter is basically the story of Jane. She is a girl who is stolen by the elves and forced to work in a factory building dragons. She steals a dragon, she escapes, and things don't get better for her. I'm not sure what else to say. I threw in a great deal of traditional fantasy literature, a great deal of elves and dunters and knockers and green men and such but I put it into the 20th century. The land of Faerie has been fully industrialized and is reaping all of the benefits of it.

DS: As far as the style and the tone of the book goes, I've read it and enjoyed it but I find it almost impossible to explain to anybody else such that it does it justice what the style is like.

MS: Well, thank you.

DS: It defies description. It's a combination of 20th century phrases and slogans mixed in with the normal language of Faerie.

MS: It seemed like a good idea to me. It started out as a joke, basically. I was driving to Pittsburgh with my wife and we were talking about locomotives and we were talking about fantasy. I made a joke about the Baldwin Steam Dragon Works and Marianne laughed. We drove on for a couple of miles and I said “Write that down.” I recognized that there was an idea, that there was a story there. By the time we got to Pittsburgh I knew that it was at least a novella and by the time that I wrote it I knew that it was a good solid novel. And everything basically followed from that. If you have somebody working in a factory they have to be dealing with the language and issues of the 20th century. At the same time, if the elves put her there, you've got to deal with all the expectations of that. It was a very rich experience for me.

DS: Did you find it difficult to keep one aspect of it from jarring the others and from predominating?

MS: It took off. It wasn't easy to write, but it just fit together. I think it was a great idea and I'm very happy with it.

DS: You also do a lot of exploration of contemporary situations, specifically when Jane goes to college...

MS: Obviously, I was thinking of my own experiences and those of my friends. She had to go to college because at the end of the novel she has to stand before the powers that be and demand an explanation, and for her to demand this explanation of God essentially, she can't be a child, an innocent. She had to grow up in the course of the book, she had to go out into the world, she had to have sex, she had to have friends and relationships and she had to know loss. She needed a great deal of experience before she was qualified to demand an answer.

DS: I noticed in the review in Locus that the book was referred to as having “a high scatalogical content.” Do you think that that is valid?

MS: Well, I think the reviewer missed the word there. There is practically no scatology there but there is a great deal of vulgarity throughout and there is a lot of strong language and such. I can't really go into detail over the radio but what was intended was fairly spoken. She is living in a very harsh world, a working class world. When I was writing it, I clipped out a picture of the Sex Pistols and hung it up over my desk just to remind myself that if she was living in a harsh fantasy world that the creatures, the demons and goblins she would have to deal with would be at least as threatening as people that you could run into on the streets of New York and London.

DS: Let's talk a little about your background. You've been selling fiction since 1980.

MS: 1980 was my first publication, and I had been writing for ten years before that and during nine of that I never managed to finish a story. I decided to become a writer and trashed my life entirely. I made sure that I had no other skills at all and I kept writing. I wrote for ten years and one day I finished a story and it was if a switch had gone off and I said, “Oh, that's how you do it—finish the stories and then you can sell them.” It became much easier after that.

DS: What had made you decide you wanted to be a writer? A lot of people get attracted to the idea of sleeping late and then find out that it's a tremendous amount of work.

MS: It is a tremendous amount of work and certainly you couldn't be a writer if you didn't want it desperately enough to do all of this work. On the other hand, I've had jobs that were worse. In fact, when I decided to become a writer it was the summer between high school and college. I was working in a furniture factory on the loading docks ten hours a day and I could not sit down according to the rules there. I had to look busy but since there was a slowdown in the economy there wasn't a lot of work for me to do. There was this quarter mile long wooden conveyor belt and at one end was the factory where they made chairs and sofas and they would put them onto the conveyor belt. My job was to take and peel off these enormous baggies from these huge rolls they had and put them over the chairs and slide them into the proper slots on the loading docks. This was a very tedious job and there was a long space between each chair but if I were to go into the factory and work productively, it was such a long distance that by the time I walked to the factory and then walked back there would be a mound of chairs at the end of the conveyor belt like a huge logjam where they had piled up on each other. So, I had to spend 10 hours a day basically looking busy. I would walk around looking busy and pick up little pieces of brown wrapping tape off of the floor and I would write invented words on them, words and phrases and sentences. By the end of the summer, I had moved on to paragraphs. There was something about it, and I decided I was going to be a writer. I said I was a writer and that I would make my living from it. How I knew then, I do not know.

DS: Having established that you wanted to be a writer, why did you pick the field of science fiction?

MS: Essentially, at that time, SF/F were both very exciting and challenging and interesting, intellectually alive fields at that time especially, about 1968 or so, and the mainstream was not. Most serious books were written by college professors and were about infidelity. They were about somebody discovering his wife was cheating on him, or cheating on his wife and discovering that she didn't like this, and they were tedious works. They weren't writing books like Faulkner wrote or Hemingway wrote, or any of the celebradons of the mainstream. They were mostly very dull, whereas in SF there were lively imaginations at work and since I didn't have a wife and couldn't, therefore, be unfaithful to her, I had no experience that qualified me for the mainstream. In science fiction and fantasy, I could find out things. I could read, I could research, I could talk to people. It was a field that was open and interesting.

DS: Your wife is a scientist. Do you have any educational background in science?

MS: Not much, really. My father was an engineer and I grew up immersed in popular science. I was sure I was going to be a scientist until I got to college and hit freshman chemistry and discovered that you could set up an experiment completely correctly and do everything right and run it and have it bomb out, fail entirely. For complex experiments, even the best researchers can sometimes run an experiment twice and have it come out two ways. It was an extremely frustrating experience for me. In SF, if you set it up right and you have a beautiful theory and you know what you expect the outcome to be, you just write “And it works.” and on you go into the story. No, I don't have the qualifications and I'm afraid that I don't have the attitude to be a scientist. I don't have the patience.

DS: You write some very hard science fiction such as in Griffin's Egg, works that require scientific speculation. Is that an uphill battle?

MS: It's a lot of work and a lot of research, but at the same time the intellectual rigor of having to be honest to the material, to the facts as they are known, it provides you with an armature, a skeleton that the story can rest upon and work naturally from. So, if you have a good idea for a hard SF story then all you need is a couple of months of research and a lot of hard work and you'll have a good story. There is no other genre that guarantees that.

DS: When you write fantasy, do you bring the same sort of rigor to it?

MS: I do a lot of research for fantasy, but obviously you can't do the same kind of research. For one thing, the mythological, supernatural characters, if you do research into these things, they all contradict each other. I decided that after writing Iron Dragon's Daughter that the big difference between science fiction and fantasy is that in science fiction the universe is essentially knowable, whether you can actually solve the problem and learn something or not, it is a knowable universe. Given time enough and attention enough, you could delve into its secrets. In fantasy, the universe is essentially unknowable at it's heart. That's the big difference.

DS: You mentioned your chemistry experiments that may not always work right, despite being done identically. That basically came out whole cloth in the book.

MS: Jane was trying to make a sophic stone, and that was pretty much my experience copied directly there. I actually did do a fair amount of research. The alchemy there is all accurate. I read a few books and as I was reading them I took the same sort of notes that Jane would have been taking in class for it. I can't think of anything else interesting to say about it.

DS: As a chemist myself, I found the whole section where she was studying to be an alchemist to ring very true.

MS: I went to the University of Pennsylvania and got some information from Dr. Van Dyke there for the physical chemistry sections. He was a great deal of help. He also showed me how to make electric pickles. It's an experiment that if you know a little bit of wiring you can do at home. You take a cord and attach the two end to two nails and I would suggest putting a knife switch in there as well. If you impale a large pickle over the two nails and put household current through it, one end of the pickle will fluoresce bright yellow from the sodium in the salt, the ions in the salt picking up the energy and losing it again. It's a great party trick.

DS: In this book, you had the opportunity to write allegorically about contemporary problems and situations. For example, you had racism between the various races of Faerie.

MS: The dwarves took the part of African-Americans in this country. They are very easy to discriminate against. They're all short. You can tell at a glance if someone is a dwarf or not. He doesn't have to open his mouth, you don't need to know a thing about him, there he is. In the book, I decided they don't partake of African-American culture. That would have been cool. There are these wonderful folk tales about swamp haunts and such that are really rich material for fantasy and I can't think of anybody that's used them yet. It didn't really fit into the scheme of my novel, unfortunately. They have sort of a Tolkeinesque ethnic background, but their situation is certainly analoguous to that of many Americans.

DS: Do you feel that the tone of this book is nihilistic?

MS: Well, that is one of the tones. Jane is a wonderful character, she never gives up. She has a lot of spunk and courage. She tries everything. She's in a very bad situation at the beginning and it doesn't get better. She tries being brave and daring, she tries being cold and calculating, she tries not giving a damn, she tries nihilism and none of it works. The book is not nihilstic, but there is a major streak of it. The dragon himself, Melanchthon, is extremely nihilistic. He is the voice of nihilism and despair and he is what eventually she has to come to terms with. He is defeated, he is wrong, ultimately. So, no the book is not nihilistic.

DS: In the book, Jane is an outsider to her setting and is basically in over her head all the time, and feels awkward as anyone growing up does.

MS: She learns from this as she goes through these awful experiences. Halfway through the book, my wife said to me “You realize that she is a spy. Nobody in this world can comprehend her. Her motivations are totally opaque to them. She is putting on a false face, acting as if she belongs with them.” It really is what happens to her. She has to be, as an outsider, some sort of spy. At the same time, by doing so, she makes herself as strange to the rest of the world as it is to her.

DS: You do a very convincing job of writing of the teenage years. Do you have a special empathy for that time?

MS: I was unhappy as a teenager and I swore to God that I would remember it. It was an extremely unhappy time. I don't think that it was just me or my situation, although I was living outside of Richmond Virginia and I would not recommend that to any teenager in the world. It was such a difficult time and yet there were a lot of people who would say that your young years are the best years of your life, which is obvious nonsense. I swore that I would remember this and that if I wrote about what it was like to be a teenager, I would put in all of the hard and difficult parts so that if a teenager were to happen to read this, she would know that somebody would see it every bit as bad as they might be experiencing it and lived through it. There was something beyond and just the fact of writing about it as being a particularly difficult time indicates that things will get better, as they do.

DS: I read “U F O” several years ago, and find the images popping into my head at odd times for odd reasons. Is this one that you enjoy of your own work.

MS: That is probably the least popular story of my entire career. It was a comedy, a bleak comedy. That one really was nihilistic. I was taking on a punk voice. I knew a few people who were punk in aesthetic and I thought it would be interesting to try it out. It was interesting and I liked it a lot, but by and large people did not like that story at all. It was written as from the viewpoint of someone going through the hard teenage years. The other things where I've written about young people are from the viewpoint of somebody who has lived through them and found that things do get better on the other side of the tunnel.

DS: You've received award nominations from your very first published story.

MS: Actually my first two published stories were nominated for the same award. They were competing against each other. That was a big thrill. I recommend losing awards to any new writer. It's a great feeling. At some point, I lost thirteen major awards without winning one, and it was pretty cool. You could brag about it and bring it up yourself in conversation without seeming conceited because you say “I've lost so many.” Really, it's a brag.

DS: Obviously, it would be nice to win these things. Did that ever occur to you as a writer that “I'd really like to win once."

MS: I know enough about the field that I've been able to watch other people's careers, and my perception is that if you are good enough (and I've got faith in my own work) sooner or later if you keep on producing good work, they feel sorry for you and give you an award. In the long run, it doesn't matter. Did Fritz Leiber win one of every award available to him? I can't guess, I'm sure he won several awards, but that's not really important. The work is the important bit. Someone like Avram Davidson or Joanna Russ must have won some awards somewhere because they are so good.

DS: You've written about Picasso several times. Recently, you wrote the collection of story beginnnings about him.

MS: That was just a joke. I was on GEnie, one of the computer nets, and I had just gone to see an exhibit of Picasso still lifes. Good art shows always inspire me to write and I made a remark about this. In a fit of bravado, I said that I'd prove this by writing a couple of paragraphs for a story opening every day for a week. I proceeded to do that, basically as a trick. Gardner Dozois saw these and told me I ought to polish them up and number them and sell them to him as a story. Eventually, there came a day when I was depressed and needed something to cheer me up, so I did. I had a story called “The Man who Met Picasso” which lost a World Fantasy Award. I had gone to get a bobache, a dripping plate on a chandelier, and the man who made the repairs was a saintly old man with a white halo of hair that the afternoon sun caught and made blaze. He told me the story. He told me how he was in Paris studying to be an artist in his youth and he had met Picasso, who had sent him on a wizard quest to the Prado to look at one painting and come back and tell him what he saw. It's a wonderful story that takes 45 minutes to tell, a magical story. I came back and told it to my wife, who loved it and told it to a friend and she loved it. I realized that I was losing a great deal of my life this way, so I wrote it down and added a fantasy element and it sold to Omni. That one was pretty much forced into my hands. The other thing I like about Picasso, that I identify with him, is that he worked a lot. He was probably not a good human being, but he got out every day and he worked. He painted, and tried something new. If it didn't work, he'd paint several more paintings and he kept on working. I identify with that, that you have to do a great deal of work to bring out what is good. All of my heroes are hard working sorts.

MS: I sold a batch of stories to Asimov's and I think they have all been printed. The last of which was “The Changeling's Tale” which was my homage to J. R. R. Tolkein. I'm writing a lot of stories now. I have one about a man who is dead and exists running upside down on telephone wires at night. I've written a fantasy essay called “In the Tradition” which I confidently expect will offend everybody. That will be in Asimov's. I've got about 40 stories lying around the house in various states of repair and disrepair. I'm doing the research on another novel. I can't say much about it because I'm such a slow worker. I've got a cool idea, a good astronomical setting that no one has ever used. I'm going to write a hard science novel and I expect that it will be great. Whether anyone will like it or not is another story.

I'll admit it: I'm not much of a fantasy reader. Like everyone my age, I read Lord of the Rings and the Thomas Covenant books in high school. Beyond that, I just seldom seek out much fantasy. If it weren't for interview preparation, I would have missed some fantasies that I really enjoyed. These include Laurie J. Marks’ Dancing Jack, George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, Cole and Bunch's The Far Kingdoms and sequels, and Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series.

Truth be told, I didn't get to read much of Tad Williams’ book prior to actually interviewing him. At the time, To Green Angel Tower Part 2 had just come out in paperback. I read a little, but not enough to have that strong a grasp of it all. Reading a few hundred pages out of a 2,000 page story does not fill one with total confidence. Because Tad is a locqucious guy and very interesting, this all took care of itself. I felt a little shaky at first but within minutes knew this would be just fine. He was very pleasant, and a former radio talk show host himself. He has a much better radio voice than I do, in fact. He's one of the guests I've always hoped to run into again, just to continue the conversation. Not only is he a good writer, he's a cool dude.

This interview was recorded via telephone with Tad Williams in June, 1994.

DS: This is not a book or series [To Green Angel Tower and Memory, Sorrow and Thorn] that lends itself well to synopsization.

TW: No, unfortunately you are absolutely right. It's not just an everything-but-the-kitchen sink book, by God there's a kitchen sink in there also. You can't sum it up too quickly.

DS: Tell us as well as you can, a little about the sweep of the story. This is a giant epic story, there's not a whole lot to boil down.

TW: It is an epic fantasy set in a world that, at least at the beginning, looks much like medieval Europe. As the main characters get farther away from their starting point they discover things that are much stranger that that. One of the reasons that it is so large is that it is not just an epic fantasy in and of itself, but it's also my response to all of the great fantasies that I've read. I kept finding myself with other things I wanted to talk about on the subject of fantasy within the text. I also just have too many characters, so it just kept getting larger and larger. I couldn't introduce a character and get the audience involved with them and then not find out what happened to them by the end of the story.

DS: Let's dig into that a little more. You've been reading fantasy and heroic fiction for most of your life, I would guess.

TW: Yes, just about.

DS: What exactly is it about this that made you want to become a writer of it yourself?

TW: There's two things going on. One is that when it's good, and fantasy considered in the larger sense—almost anything is a fantasy. Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is fantasy, The Odyssey and the Iliad are fantasies because they deal with things that aren't really the real world as we know them and weren't real at the time. So when fantasy works, its wonderful for a variety of reasons that I could talk about. The other aspect, though, is that fantasy as a commercial product has become incredibly successful and as a result, as with anything that is commercially successful, it has drawn in a lot of not very good stuff, Product with a capital “p". As somebody who loves fantasy as a genre but at the same time said, as many writers do, “I can do better than that.” The combination of those two things is what led me into it.

DS: Specifically about this book, this is the second part of To Green Angel Tower.

TW: That's almost embarrassing. I had planned originally when I outlined it to write it in a single volume and once I turned in this horrendously long outline, which the outline itself was as long as many people's novels, my publisher realized it was a multivolume book to get this finished. I eventually settled on three volumes. When I started writing the hardcover of the third volume of the original manuscript that there was so much stuff to be wrapped up that it really should have been two books. But, I was not going to spring a fourth book on people when I told them it was three. I wrapped it all up in that one volume, but it was a tremendously long volume—something like 1200 pages in hardcover. You simply cannot bind a paperback book the way you can a hardcover. They are flimsier because of the way that they are made. We couldn't get that hardcover into a single paperback book that would have lasted through an entire reading with pages flying out all over the place. It was purely a practical decision.

DS: When you sat down to write the series when you first started, were you aware it would grow to such a length?

TW: No, I knew by the time I started it that it was going to be more than a single volume and as I said I was shooting for three. They turned out to be three extremely long books. A lot of people out there may have seen or read The Lord of the Rings, and this is twice as long in words as that. I really didn't know that would happen. Part of it was that as a writer I was maturing, and I was learning to trust my instincts. Trusting my instincts often meant following plot tangents and characters off in directions I hadn't planned. Once I got there, it looked interesting. I still had all of the things I'd originally planned to do in the book, but now I had all of this new storylines and characters cropping up.

DS: Do you think as fantasy gets more popular and more writers are writing in the genre, is there more of a burden on the individual author to make it different?

TW: I think that if you don't write a book and decide to write the best damn book that anyone's ever written, I think you are in trouble from the word go. If I had simply sat down and said “I'm going to write another successful commercial epic fantasies", I don't think I would have been able to finish it. I sat down and decided that I had things to say, I've got a big reaction to what I think has gone wrong in the field of fantasy as a genre, and I had a lot of things I wanted to talk about in the philosophical and moral sense, and I had a lot of commentary. I had all of these things I wanted to do with that book, and I think any writer needs ... inspiration is an old-fashioned word but I think you need to be driven, certainly.

DS: Did you anticipate that the books would be as successful as they are, or was that a surprise?

TW: Somebody asked me this the other day about my first book, if I was surprised when it did well. It sounds megalomaniacal, but no, I wasn't surprised. I read an awful lot, and I felt that I could do a good job. I've always been a storyteller, I love words, I love fiction, I love what fiction does for people because that's what it did for me. These amazing things that no other art form can do for you. I said that I think I can do a good job, and once I'd finished, I said “I think it is good.” I thought people would see that it wasn't a run of the mill book. The fact that it does well also doesn't mean anything in and of itself, because everybody knows that if you look at popular music or popular art or popular culture of any kind—just because something sells well doesn't meant that it's great art either. I'm not kidding myself that that means I'm a great artist when I've sold a lot of books. I did think that they would do fairly well, and I was, of course, pleased when that proved to be true.

DS: Now that you've been writing for a while and you've had the success, does that affect your writing of future books? Do past successes make you write a different book?

TW: I think, first of all, at the kind of length that this series was and the next big thing that I'm working on, you better damn well better get up every morning and really be into what you are doing. It took me eight years to write the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn books. That's a career. You don't just get up, knock it out and go on to something else. You are committed to living with those characters and that book for a long time. In that sense, you do have to be really involved with what you are doing and really care about it. As far as what effect it has on future books, it has made the decision making process more poignant. [laughs] Before, I was at a certain level of success as a writer of commercial product. Let's face it—(A) I want to make a living off of what I'm doing, because I love doing it and don't want to do anything else. (B) The people selling my books want to keep selling books and even sell more if they can. But, I've always said that I won't write the same thing twice because I wouldn't be interested in that. It would show. When somebody is saying that we can virtually guarantee you twice as much money if you write the same thing again, compared to what you will get for doing something different. Then you are forced to look at yourself and say, “Do I really want to live by these principles that I brought up a lot when it was easy?” When it wasn't a question of real money, I threw them around a lot. In that sense, it has made them much more poignant. I have decided that I have to do what I want to do and I can't write the same book twice, so maybe I won't sell quite as well as somebody who has developed a real familiarity and you always know what their next book is going to be. In that sense, it has made it more clear to me that these decisions have ramifications.

DS: Would you have gone into it if you had known that it would be such a big commitment of your life?

TW: That's a difficult question to answer. I probably would have. First of all, it became a very important story to me and once I'd started it I did want to see it all the way through. Secondly, I get a lot of nice responses about them. People say things about these books that make me glad I wrote them. I guess I would have, but it is certainly something that you look at and consider seriously. As a matter of fact, I just started this new quite long series of books. When I finished the trilogy and this eight years of my life, I told my friends that if I ever start something like this again, shoot me. Either they are poor friends or just bad shots, because I'm starting another multi-books series. I guess I have not learned my lessons. A story must be as long as it has to be. A long book is a different kind of book, but it has its own intrinsic value.

DS: The fans get their favorite characters and they get attachments too, and you get characters that you like, after you get into the second or third book, is it hard to “kill your darlings", so to speak?

TW: It's never easy when you have that kind of relationship with, admittedly imaginary, people. It's not easy to kill them off, but one of the things that I did very deliberately was that I started killing them off early in the first book. [laughs] In part, one of my complaints with commercial fantasy is that these catastrophic worldwide convulsions occur, and very few people die—and those are expendable. Anybody knows who had a family that lived in Europe during the World Wars, or in Asia during World War II, that these kinds of conflagrations affect everybody. Everybody knows somebody who has lost someone. I didn't want my readers to sit back and believe that almost all of these characters would survive. I wanted them on the edge of their seats, not knowing what I would do next. I did start killing off major characters fairly early and continued it all the way through. This was not to be dramatic or cruel, but simply because that was the kind of situation that these characters were in. It was a very dangerous time when there was nothing you could trust, institutions had crumbled and the world was at war. As a result, I think my readers could never sit back in comfort and feel positive that these characters that they had identified with were all going to be fine at the end of the book.

DS: Tell us about what you did before you started writing.

TW: I'll talk about those ones that I can mention in front of a mixed audience. I did a lot of different things. A lot of writers have these bizarre and varied curriculum vitae. I think it is in part that we always have the sense that we are meant for something other than a normal job, wearing a tie—or that we are unfit for a normal job, as is more often the case. I did a lot of different things. I always had some sort of artistic thing going, and then usually something to actually pay the rent. On the rent paying side, I sold shoes, threw newspapers, managed savings and loans and art stores, sold comic books, waited tables, just about everything that you can name in terms of low paying, low esteem jobs. On the creative side, I did theater, I was in a rock band for a number of years, I did radio for about 12 years. I was a commercial artist, cartoonist, technical artist. I've done it, whatever it is. I didn't necessarily do it well, don't get me wrong. Probably some of these people are extremely happy that I became a writer so as never to inflict my skills on their particular chosen profession again. I've done a lot of kind of strange things.

DS: That helps with the writing, that you've been around and done so many different things.

TW: Absolutely. My characterization, my one line synopsis of most writers in terms of our intellectual prowess is that we tend to be a mile wide and an inch deep. We know a little bit about a lot of things. We don't tend to have very deep vertical knowledge of anything. Some writers do, but most of us are just kind of gadflies. We know a lot about a lot of strange useless subjects.

DS: Of this huge cast of characters, which ones are the ones that you like the best personally?

TW: That's always hard to say. Many of them have their genesis as some fragment of my own already somewhat fragmented personality, which I then add to and change until it becomes a real person. I come from a very food oriented family. We are fiercely protective about food and very interested in it—if you reach across someone else's plate you get fork marks in the back of your hand. So one of the characters, started out literally as a starving, very hungry scholar. It was that aspect of me that was the first thing that informed him as a character. By the end of the books, he was completely different. That was only just one tiny bit of his personality. In that sense, a lot of them have something . do with me. Obviously, the main character goes through a lot of the things I and my brothers went through during adolescence, so there is a great deal of personal stuff in it. A lot of the lessons that he learns as he moves into adulthood are lessons that I'm still trying to learn as I move through adulthood. I'm also very fond of some of the quirkier characters. The troll Benebik is one that most people seem to like, and he is certainly a favorite of mine. I'd be hard pressed to name specifically all of them. I like some of the villains tremendously, and I like the monsters a lot. It's hard for me to pick anybody. It's like picking which of your children you like the best.

DS: With all these characters in there, is keeping control of the cast difficult, like taking a bus full of kids on a field trip?

TW: [laughs] It feels like taking a bus load full of armed children, is what it feels like. [laughs] One of the things I learned to do during these books—it has served me well and will continue to serve me well—is to have a certain amount of faith in my own ability to work things out. A lot of it is not necessarily in a conscious sense. I don't literally sit down and solve them, but I just walk away from them for a couple of days. The subconscious does the hokey-pokey and after a while I come back and all of the sudden, the solution that pops into your brain is a much better solution than the ones you were tying to hammer out consciously. It connects things, and answers some questions while setting up something for the last volume that you've been wondering about. I think that is another reason why I will continue to write big books. I've learned that I'm good at , or my subconscious is good at weaving these very large tapestries.

DS: When you were setting up this milieu for these books, there seems to be some consistencies between the races and our existing ethnic groups. Was that your starting point?

TW: This is where you get into Tadspeak 101 if you aren't careful. I had a lot of thought that went into a lot of these things. Sometimes you get more than you really wanted to know. One of the reasons that I did that is because I knew about the decisions you make with a fantasy novels and with world building in particular. If I had been true to my first impulse, I would have made the whole thing completely alien and completely foreign. Literally, I would have tried to simulate languages that didn't feel anything like human languages. What I realized fairly early in the planning stage is that there were going to be so many characters and so many changes of scene—I've got twenty different focus point locales going at any one time—that I needed to give people some handles to hand onto so they could make the associations quickly. When a character shows up who has sort of a Scandinavian sounding name, they can figure out which group they belong to. This character is probably with so-and-so. If all the names were indistinguishably different from regular familiar stuff, people would have to literally start from scratch with the introduction of a new character or a change of scene. I based some of these things on Earthlike cultures, or at least Earthlike languages, vary particularly to give people a bit of a road map. This let people jump more quickly into the important stuff, which is what is happening to the characters rather than who are they, where are they from.

DS: You've mentioned your other big book and a few short pieces that you are working on. What sort of shorter works are you doing?

TW: I have short stories hither and thither all over the place. I did a short story for a Michael Moorcock Elric anthology, and a short story for a Neil Gaiman Sandman anthology. Neither of these were very short, I might add, typical of me. I have a short novel coming out this fall called Caliban's Hour, which is based on Shakespeare's The Tempest from Caliban's point of view, although this is what happened after The Tempest as well. I'm really excited about that. I'm starting the next big thing, which is not an epic fantasy, although it will have a lot of fantasyish elements, as well as science fictional elements. It is called Otherland, and I'm very excited about that. I've just started working on that.

TW: I was just sitting with my publishers last night at dinner. We were talking laughingly about the first time we met in San Francisco in 1985, which is when we agreed that this would be my second book. My first book, Tailchaser's Song, they had already bought. We were reminiscing about this, and I asked them if they realized that that was the point they agreed to do it. The final book is only now coming out! It's been ten years since the inception of this project, and the last paperback volume is finally hitting the stands. It's been a very long time.