Speaking of the Fantastic III. Брайан Герберт

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СКАЧАТЬ sequel could fit in, a floating vampire lifestyle novel....

      Martin: Vampires, unfortunately have been done.... At the time I did Fevre Dream in 1982, Anne Rice had done the first of her books. There were a few other vampire books out there, but there was not nearly the glut that there has been today. I am tempted to return to the world of Fevre Dream, but I have reservations about it too simply because I think that vampires are on the verge of being done to death, so to speak. It’s hard to think of anything original to do. Maybe I should return to “The Skin Trade,” my werewolves. They haven’t been done quite as much.

      Q: How about Lovecraft’s themes, horror stories of the larger cosmos? Have you ever given that any thought?

      Martin: I loved Lovecraft when I was younger. He was one of my favorite writers when I was high school. I read everything I could get by him. I’ve occasionally played with Lovecraftian things. There is a character in my Wild Cards novel who is haunted by Lovecraftian sorts of dreams at a certain point. I wrote up several of those, when the character was dreaming, in my best Lovecraft imitation. I am not sure how well I did. I certainly tried to do my best to capture it.

      I don’t think I could do a pure Lovecraftian story, because there is a certain passivity about his heroes that drives me crazy. Being driven mad by understanding the truth and giving in to it is not something I could do with my own characters. His view of the universe and the way he got horrific effects still could be effective, so maybe someday I’ll do something with that. It was really Derleth who organized and codified his mythos, and I think that in some ways by doing that he did him a disservice.

      Q: He basically wrecked it.

      Martin: Yes.

      Q: I wasn’t talking about doing a pastiche, but extending Lovecraft’s themes. I am not sure Derleth ever wrote a decent Lovecraftian story.

      Martin: No. He certainly never captured the feeling. He could use the same names and books and dark gods and so forth, but never to anything close to the effect that Lovecraft achieved.

      Q: We’ve been talking about novels here, but I can’t help but wonder if, after having written seven long epic volumes, you will feel an urge for compression and write short fiction.

      Martin: I think my work has gotten longer as I’ve gotten older and deeper into my career. I don’t think, when I finish Ice and Fire, that I am ever going to do anything on that scale again. I’m not immediately going to start another seven-volume mega-opus. I can be pretty certain of that. But I am not sure I am going to go back to writing short stories either. The truth is, I haven’t done a true short story in years. Even when I do write short fiction, it tends to come out at novella length. But I might very well, once Ice and Fire is done, do some novellas and maybe even a few novelets and certainly a stand-alone novel or two.

      Q: Of course once The Song of Ice and Fire is done, 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, СКАЧАТЬ