Speaking of the Fantastic III. Darrell Schweitzer

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 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 СКАЧАТЬ