Speaking of the Fantastic III. Darrell Schweitzer
the publisher could say, “This is so successful, here’s five million dollars. Write me another one.” What then?
Martin: I do wrestle with that. I figure it remains to be seen what will happen to me after Ice and Fire, the reception the next book will get. In some ways you never know. Is your audience going to follow you when you do something different? I now have hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of readers, but are they Ice and Fire readers, or are they George R. R. Martin readers? Until I do my first new book after the series, I’m not going to know. You see examples on both sides in our field. You see someone like Strephen R. Donaldson, who can achieve huge sales with the Covenant series, but then when he moves to science fiction with the Gap series, it doesn’t sell very well. On the other hand, you see someone like Stephen King. He can do stand-alone horror novels and the Dark Tower series and they all sell equally well. So King readers are really King readers, not readers of a particular book or a particular series. But Donaldson’s readers were Covenant fans, not Donaldson fans. I don’t know. But it is certainly something that concerns me. I am not going to say that I am going to be done with Westeros forever, this world I have created, but it is certainly not the only thing I want to write. So once it is done, I certainly will attempt to do other things in science fiction or horror or even in other genres that I haven’t touched on yet, and the question remains, will my audience follow me there?
Q: Might you have to develop a series of pseudonyms and become several writers?
Martin: Hopefully not.
Q: Thanks George.
Recorded at Boskone, Boston, February 16, 2006.
JAMES MORROW
Q: So what’s all this stuff about reason? Your latest novel, The Last Witchfinder is not so much about witches and devils but about rejecting the belief in them.
Morrow: The Last Witchfinder doesn’t deal with what many people mean by witches, witches as a feminist cult of healing and cosmic consciousness, nor is it about the sort of witchcraft we associate with the Third World, having to do with, again, curing disease, or perhaps with raising the dead. I am addressing the big problem that emerged in early Renaissance Europe, and which quickly became a kind of holocaust: the problem of the specifically Christian heresy of Satanism.
If you told fortunes in those days or practiced some other esoteric pursuit—herbal healing, whatever—you were vulnerable to the charge of Devil worship. The problem was not the practices per se, but the redefinition of them as evidence of a Satanic compact. Today Catholic scholars would argue that this kind persecution was itself heretical, and should have been perceived as such. And, indeed, in the medieval era the Catholic Church held it to be anathema to go after witches.
But, for whatever reasons, theologians in the early Renaissance began noticing how damn much demonology there is in the New Testament. Jesus is forever casting out evil spirits and consigning demons to the bodies of pigs, wicked spirits that were once inside people. So you can’t really argue that Christian demonology is an aberration. Sad to say, the persecutions trace to theologians paying attention to what’s actually happening in the Gospels. It’s not all that’s happening, but there is an enormous amount of demonology in the New Testament, which seems to suggest a Satan, a Devil, a Dark One, who has dominion over this world, and once you’ve interpreted the Gospels in that way, you start looking around for the agents of that Devil.
Q: Do you think the witch-hunting came from the top down or the bottom up? That is, was it a means used by the authorities to control the masses, or was it a matter of popular hysteria over matters people could not control—the Black Death, Muslim pirates raiding the coasts of Europe, famines, etc.—demanding action from the government?
Morrow: I imagine both were going on at the same time. But what interests me—as a person who takes a very dim view of religious arguments about how the world works—is the top-down, institutionalized persecution of supposed witches. It was highly systematic, codified in the Malleus Malificarum of Kramer and Sprenger. There was a whole elaborate infrastructure of ecclesiastical and civil courts to prosecute the agents of Lucifer.
Of course, one can also psychologize about outbreaks of witch persecution. This is especially common in the case of Salem—there are scholars who say, “Well it wasn’t really about theology, it was really all about neighbors settling scores with one another.” Or they’ll say, “The Puritans were obviously taking their fears of the Indians and projecting them onto their neighbors.” Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible seems to say the Salem tragedy was really about the frustrated libidos of the girls who brought the accusations. Some historians even insist it was really all about the girls going batty because they were eating bread contaminated with ergot, a fungal disease of rye plants.
These interpretations are all interesting—but, again, let’s remember that the phenomenon of witch persecution went on for nearly three hundred years. That doesn’t sound like hysteria to me. That sounds like something systematic and institutional. As I mentioned earlier—and this was a discovery that I made while researching the book—witch persecution is, alas, a logical implication of Christian theology. Yes, there is also some demonology in the Old Testament, but we find it largely in the famous translation authorized by James I, who fancied himself an expert demonologist and even wrote a book on the subject. The King James Bible was translated by witch believers, and this state of mind influenced many of their word choices. Think about that notorious line from Exodus, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Today a Hebrew scholar would translate it in much more innocuous terms. It would come out something like, “Thou shalt not provide a fortune-teller with his means of livelihood.”
Q: Describe your book for our readers. It’s about someone who wants to put an end to the witchcraft statues.
Morrow: A big influence on The Last Witchfinder is a book called Masks of the Universe by the physicist Edward Harrison—whom I must get in touch with: I don’t think Harrison knows there’s a novel floating around that traces directly to his notion of the witch-universe, the “psychic space” in which most people lived during the Renaissance. The big discovery I made, as I continued my research, was that a person born around 1678 would have lived in the transition from Harrison’s witch-universe to what we now call the Enlightenment. So I said to myself, “Hey, that’s pretty damn dramatic. I won’t need a huge cast of characters to make this epic happen. It can be one woman’s quest. It will be the story of Jennet Stearne and her obsession with bringing down the conjuring statues of her day.”
Also, being a feminist—and knowing, as with Only Begotten Daughter, that for me it’s always fruitful to put a strong woman at the center of a novel—I imagined Jennet as not only living through the great rotation, from the witch-universe to the scientific worldview, but actually helping to make it happen. She participates actively in the paradigm shift, by campaigning to destroy the 1604 Witchcraft Statute of James I, which gave an outward appearance of rationality to the witch courts.
Q: Curiously, you did this as a form of fantasy novel.
Morrow: I was just on a Readercon panel about the continuum that ranges from mimetic fiction to the fantastic, from characters who merely change internally versus those who come to a completely new understanding of how the world works. I think The Last Witchfinder ranges freely around among all these coordinates. Obviously it’s not a fantasy in the wizards-and-elves sense, but rather a kind of postmodern experiment that maps pretty well onto strictly mimetic historical fiction—though, of course, it’s all told by a very unusual narrator.
As you know, The Last Witchfinder is a book written by a book. It assumes a universe in which books are conscious and have agendas and write other books. So this free-floating spirit of Newton’s Principia Mathematica is able to move effortlessly through time and space and therefore comment on the philosophy of science and Jennet’s efforts to bring the new universe into being.
Up to a point, my Principia narrator is even willing to talk about the downside of science and technology. Near the end of the book, he-she-it visits the Place de la Révolution in Paris at the height of the Terror and possesses a priest who is subsequently marched to the guillotine—the French Revolution, of course, being Exhibit A in any indictment of the Enlightenment.