Speaking of the Fantastic III. Darrell Schweitzer
Probably not. The Outback can be like the Gobi Desert; so if you’re going to go from X to Y, you’ve got to know that you have enough water and such, because if you get stuck, you could be dead. The U.S. is almost completely habitable. It’s a big country with a lot of people. Australia is a big country that is not completely habitable. You can basically only live around the edges. The interior is like the Red Planet. The Outback...where the myths reside.
One of the things that I’ve noticed as an ex-pat is that Americans look inward. It’s the idea that everything is right here and available in the United States, and to a certain extent everything is here. We produce what has become world culture. We radiate our culture out. Also, in terms of military might, we are very secure. The major superpower.
By contrast, Australia is a country that looks outward. Australia is always looking out at what is going on in the world. That is why you see Australians everywhere—they are always traveling. That’s a big difference, culturally, in the way people perceive themselves and perceive the rest of the world. Americans take it for granted that they’re from a place that is powerful, central. We assume that as Americans we’re in control, that most countries can’t screw around with the U.S. and, indeed, must make accommodations. In many ways, we Americans really are insular...insulated. You can get an idea of this by comparing news in the States with news media in Europe or Australia. Again, it’s a question of how we sense ourselves and our place in the world.
Q: The perspective I had going to Europe for the first time was an appreciation of how much older European cities are than American cities. In Rome you can see what New York will be like in two thousand years. I coined the term “the layercake of history” because you see layers upon layers from different eras. Australia is even younger than the U.S. and has even less of this. My favorite symbol of it all is in Rome: a seventeenth-century marble elephant by Bernini, with an ancient Egyptian obelisk on its back, and a papal cross on top of that. It’s as if time-travelling aliens had just grabbed all this stuff and assembled it at random.
Dann: Well, cultures subsume each other. If you conquer a country, you tear down its places of worship and build your own mosques or churches over the sites. I think you’re spot on about the U.S. and Australia being new countries. I have a friend who is a Brit, one of my dearest friends in Australia; he moved there about fifteen years ago. He tells me that when he was living in England, he could feel the accretion of history, almost like weight. There, you could be walking along the street and come across a thousand year old cairn. When you’re living in all that antiquity, the past can seem more important than the present. One of the reasons that my British friend feels such a sense of freedom in living in Australia is because everything isn’t mired in the centuries past. There is a different energy. The U.S. and Australia are similar in that respect. I think one difference between the US and Australia is that Australians still perceive England as the mother country. There is still a sense of deference here toward Great Britain, even though the majority of the people want a republic. Americans don’t feel that kind of deference, perhaps because we shrugged Great Britain off during the Revolutionary War. Australia simply wasn’t in a position to do that, primarily because communications technology had changed, allowing easier and faster communication between the colonies and the mother country. The advent of telegraphy, perhaps more than anything else, allowed England to maintain a firm hold on Australia. Before that, it could take months for messages from England to reach Australia. They left quite a bit of leeway for independence and self-government. There was a small rebellion in Ballarat, which is not far from Melbourne, after the United States declared independence, but it failed. So although the idea of a republic is very much in the public mind in Australia and it is debated constantly, the relationship between Australians and the Brits still feels to me to be somewhat colonial.
Q: This is the sort of thing you can write straight mainstream fiction about, or historical fiction, or we get back to the idea of transmogrifying the experience and writing about another planet. You’d have even greater freedom on another planet, where everything would be absolutely fresh, particularly if it was far enough away that you couldn’t get back to Earth.
Dann: [Laughs.] In a sense I’m sort of living in one of Harry Harrison’s worlds. Most unfriendlies in Australia can kill you. Spiders are deadly. Almost all the snakes are poisonous. There is one particularly nasty spider whose bite causes something like gangrene to set in the wound. There’s no antidote for it; the area just rots away. In America and Europe, most of the wildlife is benign. Not so in Australia. That puts a different perspective on things. For instance, in Queensland, you “watch out for redbacks” (spiders) before you plant your bum (ass) on the toilet.
Q: Have you met any Aborigines?
Dann: My novel Bad Medicine, which will be published as Counting Coup in the US, has just been published in Australia. One of the protagonists is a Native American medicine man. While researching this novel, I spent about a year ceremonying with Sioux people. But that’s another story for another interview. I was very interested in meeting Aboriginal people when I first got to Australia. I could see that there were certain similarities with native Americans. They’re what I think of as the similarities of natural people, that sense that they have taken on the moral and ethical roles of caretakers of the land and its deep history. But I didn’t have any real interaction until last year when my partner Janeen Webb and I were invited to be guests of the Perth Writers’ Festival. I met a guy there by the name of Boori Pryor, an Aboriginal writer. We just hit it off. As a result, I became an honorary “Blackfella”, and he became an honorary Jew. I taught him how to do Jewish schtick; he taught me Blackfella stuff.
One of the really interesting things that happened was this. We were talking when we first met, and he told me that he takes everything he writes back to his people in Queensland, and the tribal elders look at it before it’s published. The elders have the final say. We were discussing reconciliation between the government of Australia and aboriginal peoples, which is a major issue. We currently have a rather right-wing, conservative “Liberal” government. About forty years ago, Aboriginal children were taken from their parents by the State to be re-educated and re-acculturated. That generation of Aboriginals has come to be known as the Stolen Generation. As aboriginals were considered to be primitive, the government policy was to “save” the children by forcing white culture on them. Now there is a reconciliation process going on at all levels in the country. Whites from all walks of life are saying...“We’re sorry.” But John Howard, the Prime Minister, doesn’t believe that the present government should take responsibility for what happened in the past. When I first met Boori, we talked about his books and about reconciliation; and I said, “Look, if people won’t accept you, screw them. You don’t have to take this shit from white people.” His response surprised me. He said, “No, we’re all involved. We’ve got to reach out to each other. It’s not about anger. The idea is that we’re all in the world together.” This from a guy who has been beaten senseless by the police...who has lost family members and other people he loves. But he had no anger toward whites. I was the one feeling angry. And I had gotten it completely wrong. Boori and I will hang out in the future, and eventually I hope to learn something about his culture...and maybe about myself.
Q: You’re looking at this material with what is presumably a science-fictional method. That is to say, if Ernest Hemingway went to Australia and saw the things that you saw, he would write a reportorial book. You might turn it into something else.
Dann: I’ve mentioned this before. I think that working in the genre for a lifetime as I have gives you certain tools. Pam Sargent, Kim Stanley Robinson, and I have talked about using the tools of science fiction to write historical fiction. When I write historical fiction, I “extrapolate” the past, which is as alien as the future. As a science fiction writer, I look for the alien...and the past is an alien country with mindsets that our not ours. And naturally I am always looking for the alien in the familiar, for that strange kind of magical sense of wonder, that frisson that makes me want to write. That’s why all of my work, even the mainstream work, has an underlay of magical realism. I think that magical realism describes something vital and evocative about our lives. It’s that numinal, luminous, vital stuff that interests and excites me. That’s what I want to write about. In science fiction that’s the sense of wonder. Even with The Silent, which is a Civil