Speaking of the Fantastic III. Брайан Герберт
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 War novel, I was using techniques gained by writing science fiction to create my young character Mundy McDowell. He is dislocated and alienated. He has witnessed the rape and murder of his mother, heard the screams of his father, who was trapped in his burning house. So Mundy makes himself...invisible and follows ghosts and spirits, who teach him how to survive. That’s the kind of stuff that interests me. That’s the underlay of this “mainstream” novel. I used genre techniques to extend the layering of consciousness of my young protagonist.
Q: Does he literally become invisible?
Dann: He thinks he’s becoming invisible. The Silent is narrated in first person point of view. Mundy is a darker version of Huck Finn. As a reader you see how Mundy reconstructs reality; you see the world through his sensorium...through his eyes, the eyes of a child, and if I’ve done my job properly, you’ll also see with a sort of double vision—you’ll see the past through the lens of the present, and through the eyes of a child of the nineteenth century. You’ll see Mundy’s world and the objective world superimposed. The fabulous inheres in the mundane. Our mundane, go-to-the-office-and-come-home lives are limned with the mysterious, shot through with the laser light of the numin. As a writer, I try to capture those magical and often terrible superimpositions. And I like to think that science fiction gives me an edge....
(Recorded at the World Fantasy Convention, Corpus Christi Texas, Oct 26-28, 2000)
An Afterword from the Present
Dann: Reading this interview conducted in October 2000 gave me a strange sense of déjà-vu. Much of it can stand, and I found myself...agreeing with myself. A lot of the politics have remained the same: John Howard’s conservative government is still in power here in Australia; and I’m still the proverbial stranger in a strange land, although the strange land has become home in some ineffable, profound way. But home is also Los Angeles and Binghamton and New York. Where else (but New York) can you get an egg cream, I ask you?
But in some ways this interview feels like it was written long, long ago in some sense because it was pre-9/11. A time when Americans were unbeaten, when we were the iconic leaders of the pack. We are still all of that...yet we aren’t. We’ve become something different. The world has shifted.
America has become darker, less secure, and the sinister shadows of fear are growing ever longer. Our culture is fracturing at the edges while its center is becoming more homogenous. Our President is acting out a religious morality play. And we are experiencing political and cognitive dissonance.
Australia, which prided itself on being “the Great Experiment,” has been flatlined by conservative politics. It has become an integral part of the Coalition of the Willing...America’s “Sheriff in Asia.” Education, which was free when I arrived here, is free no longer. The majority of citizens have done quite well economically—Australia is a Standard & Poor’s dream—but Australians have become politically passive and unaware, while a pro-business, anti-union government has profoundly changed the nature of workplace relations. We’re reliving the greedy eighties here in Australia, and arbitrage and Reagan’s trickle-down theories reign supreme.
Yet the culture remains vibrant, and Janeen and I spend most of our time writing at our farm by the sea, and making forays to our apartment in Melbourne.
A good life between the lengthening shadows.
And the Dean book was published in 2004, titled The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean. The U.S. paperback edition should be in bookstores by the time this goes to press. Although I would guess that a lot of my genre readers didn’t see the book, which was packaged as mainstream, the genre reviews were terrific. (Locus: “Jimmy’s personal discussions and confrontations, often by phone, possess a crackling laconic energy worthy of a powerful film script. In this Dann has embraced a technique perfect for a Hollywood psychological novel, and it is by his words, tender or frenzied, that the phantom of James Dean acquires full, extraordinary life. No superficial Tinseltown gossip here, no languorous intrigues on the film set: instead, private torment, public rage.”)
Some of the mainstream reviewers loved the book, others couldn’t understand the idea of writing alternate history as literary mainstream (But James Dean died! How can you write a book about his life after the accident?), and a few became really upset with my literary icon-smashing. Kirkus Reviews, for instance, called The Rebel “Relentlessly trashy and profane, name-dropping and scandal-mongering”...“a Harold Robbins-style tale of gratuitous sex, ambition, and famous people behaving badly.” (I really did try to explain to my film agent that this was a negative review, but she just wouldn’t believe me.)
I still haven’t written my “Australian” novel. I’m working on a novel based on my novella “The Diamond Pit.” I’m still fascinated with America and the American Dream, and the novel will be a sort of family saga that begins in the 1800’s, works its way through the 1920’s and into the present. Well, I think it will end in the present. For me, stories are live things that constantly surprise and confound all my preconceived plots. Oh, yes, I’ve done a collection of my collaborative short stories called The Fiction Factory, which will be published in October; and I’m working on a number of anthologies. I’m also working on a psychological novel about nasty politics tentatively titled Extra Duty.
After all, I have to keep up my reputation as the new Harold Robbins.
19 June 2005
Windhover Farm
Australia
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