INTERVIEW WITH BITFROST,
a French science fiction magazine:
1) How and when did you discover Science Fiction and why did you eventually start writing in this field ?
Answer 1) I started reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Groff Conklin anthologies when I was 9 or 10, and fell everlastingly in love with science fiction. My mother was a writer, and my father eventually sold some of his writing too (and my daughter, Laura, a third-generation writer, won the 1993 Campbell Award). Growing up in that household, it truly never occurred to me that I might be anything other than a writer. The only question was what I would write, and that was decided well before my 11th birthday.
2) I notice there was a 10 years hiatus between your third and fourth novels. Can you explain what happened during this period of time? Did you completely stop writing?
Answer 2) From 1964 through 1975 I wrote over 200 books (mostly of "the kind men like" variety) and 3,000 articles as an anonymous hack. I did it to get rich. Well, by 1975, I'd _was_ rich, and I stopped writing anonymous trash in 1976. I sold three pretty dreadful science fiction novels in the late 1960s. They took longer to write even though they were not literarily ambitious, they didn't pay any better, and the experience convinced me I shouldn't hack in the field I loved. So I didn't write any more science fiction until I had the time and skills to do it properly.
Carol (my wife) and I had had enormous success breeding and exhibiting collies starting in 1969; dogs were the only thing besides writing that I felt we knew how to do well enough to make a living at, so in 1976 we bought the second-biggest luxury boarding and grooming kennel in America, and by 1980 it was doing well enough so I could finally take the time to write books and stories I was proud to sign my name to. I wrote one last hack book at the request of my then-agent -- the Battlestar: Galactica thing (which despite the byline was not a collaboration; I've never met Glenn Larson and he never saw the manuscript) -- and then settled down to serious writing. Originally the kennel was supposed to support me so I could write exactly what I wanted, which I assumed would not be very commercial; to my amazement, by 1986 the writing was outearning the kennel, and we finally sold the kennel in 1993.
3) What are the things you like in Science Fiction and which are your favorite themes ?
Answer 3) I like to tell moral parables, and science fiction gives you all of time and space to set up your parable and have your characters play it out. I think everyone pretty much agrees that if we can reach the stars we're going to colonize them, and that if we colonize enough of them we're going to come into contact with an alien civilization. One of my favorite themes -- and it ties into your African questions which you ask later -- is the consequences of that contact between colonists and native life forms.
4) In addition to your novels and short stories, you have also edited a number of anthologies. What has this experience brought to you as a writer and has it influenced your writing ?
Answer 4) I view it as my charity work. (No editor ever got rich on an anthology, and to be honest, I can make more money in one night of writing than in the two to three weeks it takes me to edit an anthology.)
There's an old saying that you can't pay back in this field, you can only pay forward. Anthologies are my way of doing that; I've bought 42 first stories since 1990. I'm gratified that a bunch of them have made the Hugo and Nebula ballots, but in all honesty, it's not very difficult for an editor to call Barry Malzberg or Pat Cadigan or Susan Shwartz and say, "Give me an award-quality story for such-and-such an anthology." What I am proudest of is that eight of my discoveries have made the Campbell ballot for Best New Writer.
5) In "A Miracle of Rare Design", the character of Lennox seeks to lose his humanity and to be changed into an alien. Yet, in some ways, he never really was human because of his lack of emotions, his greed and other such things. One can wonder what kind of childhood and life Lennox had which could have lead him to become what he is. Can you give us some information on this?
Answer 5) No, I'm afraid I know almost nothing about Lennox's childhood. But I _can_ tell you a little something of his origin, because A MIRACLE OF RARE DESIGN is a science fictional allegory of Sir Richard Burton's life. Here was a Victorian Englishman who went to Mecca, to the source of the Nile, to East Africa, and always learned the language and customs and totally assimilated each new culture. Each time he returned to England he was more and more unhappy and out of place, and he finally wound up his life as the governor of an almost uninhabited island in the Caribbean, spending his days translating books no one wanted to read. (Do you see now what science fiction enables me to do with something like that?)
6) In which ways would you say that the aliens in this book are so radically different from humans?
Answer 6) Well, physically they're different, of course. But the _real_ difference is that just when you're sure you comprehend them, you find that you don't. That's why even though Lennox could study the Fireflies, learn their language, gain their confidence, even undergo cosmetic surgery to physically become one of them, he will never understand why they jumped to their death off the top of that pyramid.
7) Once again, we can feel in "A Miracle of Rare Design" your fondness for Africa. Were the Zhandi inspired by a real African tribe?
Answer 7) No. Every tribe in PARADISE, PURGATORY and INFERNO has a real-life analog (as does every individual native, every animal, every building, and every landmark), but in A MIRACLE OF RARE DESIGN, the tribe was generic, since I wanted to give it some traits and beliefs that have no analogs on Earth.
8) Africa comes to mind in many of your works, from the "Kirinyaga Stories" to "A Miracle of Rare Design", including your Paradise / Purgatory / Inferno trilogy and several other books. Have you ever lived in Africa? Where does this passion come from? And how much influence is this in your writing?
Answer 8) Remember my answer about colonization? Well, Africa offers 51 separate and distinct examples of the effects of colonization on both the colonizers and the colonized. I've never lived in Africa, but Carol and I have taken a number of trips there (Kenya 4 times, plus Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Botswana, Namibia and Egypt.) I love Africa, and I weep for Africa, because I see very little immediate hope for Africa.
How much does it influence my writing? I think it brings out the best in me, artistically. I have been nominated for 13 Hugos; 12 of those stories were about Africa or African themes. I've been up for 8 Nebulas; without exception, they were all about Africa or African themes. And all my winners were African.
9) Your latest novel, "The Widowmaker", is due out in France in March (or April). Can you tell us something about this book ?
Answer 9) Anyone who's read my work knows that my knowledge of, and interest in, hard science is minimal, so my ideas are never of that type. One day a number of writers were discussing cloning, and while they were talking about gene-splicing and DNA and such, I got a couple of ideas that I didn't think had ever been addressed. One was the fact that in most of the stories I've read, full-grown clones hop off the table, ready to do whatever they've been created to do (in the case of this book, kill some outlaws)...but it seemed to me that a one-day-old clone would be at an enormous disadvantage. He'd have no memories, no education, no social skills -- so I told that story in THE WIDOWMAKER.
It also occurred to me that they'd try to alleviate that problem, perhaps by giving the clone the original's memories. But what if the original had been born over a century ago, and all of his memories were decades out of date? So I told that story too; it'll come out in the States in August of this year as THE WIDOWMAKER REBORN. It's been sold to France, but I have no idea when it will be published. The third book, THE WIDOWMAKER UNLEASHED, tells the story of the original Widowmaker, the one from who the first two books' protagonists had been cloned. He's been frozen for a century with a horribly disfiguring disease, and now they've finally developed a cure and he's revived. Physically he's 63 years old, and all he wants to do is retire and grow flowers. But he keeps running up against enemies the two clones made, enemies he of course doesn't recognize. And that's the third story...which won't come out here or anywhere else until I finish writing it this summer.
10) "The Widowmaker" is the first volume in a new trilogy... What are your feelings about series? You seem to use this technique a lot, and it also seems like this has now become a standard trend in SF.
Answer 10) Truth to tell, I don't really like to do trilogies and tetralogies. I have enough new stories to tell to last me a couple of lifetimes. But there happens to be a marketplace, and it can be very demanding, and now and then one has to genuflect to it. I try to make my little mini-series as different from each other as I can. The "Tales of the Galactic Midway" was one long novel, broken into 4 parts; the "Tales of the Velvet Comet" takes place on an orbiting brothel at 50-year intervals, and the only continuing character is the ship's computer; the "Oracle Trilogy" features a little girl who is 8 years old in one book, 18 in the next, and 28 in the last, with meaningful gaps between the stories; the Lucifer Jones stories (he's my favorite of all my creations; I have more fun writing him than doing anything else) will continue as long as
there are B movies and bad pulp stories to parody, but they're not really novels at all; the "Galactic Comedy" novels aren't even related, except that each is a science fictional allegory of an African nation's history; and the "Widowmaker Trilogy" features a different protagonist in each book. Or a different version of the same protagonist. Or something like that.
11) In "The Widowmaker", you once again use a bounty hunter, as you had in "Santiago". Also, both books have been labelled "space westerns". How do you feel about this label and how else would you describe these books?
Answer 11) I think the label's wrong. SANTIAGO was written because the opening paragraph of Ray Lafferty's SPACE CHANTY haunted me for years: "Will there be a mythology of the future, they used to ask, after all has become science? Will high deeds be told in epic, or only in computer code?" I enjoyed the mythmaking process that resulted in SANTIAGO, and to greater or lesser extents, I've used it again in the ORACLE and WIDOWMAKER books, as well as in IVORY. I think that, after my African stories, the best things I've done have been what people call my "Inner Frontier" stories, which are the ones I just mentioned, plus perhaps an early one, THE SOUL EATER. They occur in the farthest, least-explored, least-civilized portion of the galaxy -- the Inner Frontier -- because I think frontiers make the best settings for myths, and for the bigger-than-life characters with which I populate them.
12) I believe there is a movie in the works based on Santiago. Can you tell us more about this project? And have any of your other books been optioned to be made into movies?
Answer 12) Carol and I have scripted SANTIAGO for Capella Films. (She's been my uncredited collaborator for years...and she's so much more visual than I am -- a decided plus in screenwriting -- that this time I insisted that she become a -credited- collaborator. In truth, the script's 75% hers.) The producer is Ed Elbert and the Executive Producer is Jean-Louis Rubin, and they should be making it later this year. We enjoyed the experience, and have agreed to script another of my novels for a different producer. (I'd rather not name names until all the contracts are signed.) As for what's currently under option (and this doesn't mean they'll get made, just that they produce handsome option renewal checks once a year):
STALKING THE UNICORN
THE WIDOWMAKER TRILOGY
KIRINYAGA
IVORY
THE ORACLE TRILOGY
SECOND CONTACT
SEVEN VIEWS OF OLDUVAI GORGE
"Me and My Shadow"
The entire "TALES OF THE VELVET COMET" series
and of course SANTIAGO
