Insekta

Johanna was running on the white sand of the beach.
    From the cliffs towering over the bay, one would have seen nothing but a slowly moving dot, and, briefly, Balkan saw her that way. Despite the distance, he knew it was Johanna. The desire moving her toward him and her unique lightness clearly identified her. As she approached, Balkan could not hear her calling his name; the incessant lashing of the waves overwhelmed her voice. 
    His longing to have her back in his arms prevailed over every other thought. All the rest—questions, doubts, and wonder—could wait. There would be plenty of time for such things, after.
    Only a narrow strip of land now stood between the huge basaltic cliff wall and the encroaching flood tide, and Balkan sensed a looming danger, a break in the placid beauty of his vision. As the sea drew nearer, he feared there’d be no time to greet the woman he loved as he wanted to . . . with a long kiss of utter abandonment.
    In a clear sky, the light from the two suns shone at its maximum intensity of the day. Balkan had no doubt they were in the Darlan binary system, one of the most dreaded worlds in the galaxy, one haunted by every sort of pirate, raider, and dealer, the sorts of people among whom he had come to manhood and with whom he’d learned to live more than comfortably.
    But he couldn’t understand how Johanna, born on a totally different world, now found herself down there, free and lonely in this hell of a place. They’d said farewell to each other a few weeks before, but she must have changed her mind and sought him out, running a big risk to join him. Therefore, she must still love him, as he loved her. And that was more than enough: damn the tides, the volcanoes, and the raiders attacking the planet. As he always did, he would find a way to help her—even to take advantage of the situation for their mutual benefit, to bring the two of them together again.
    Johanna was only a few hundred meters away when Balkan saw the beast. A giant eagle-like bird, high in the sky, banked and dove straight toward the woman on the beach. Balkan, stunned, doubted his own eyes. So far as he’d known, there were no animals of any kind on Darlan IV, except barbarous human beings.
    However, he vividly remembered the stories his grandfather had told him when he was a child, tales of rapacious condor-like birds ravaging villages already plundered by the powerful Lords in the farthest systems of the Empire, before the birth of the League of Planets. Still, he’d never suspected that such creatures still lived and certainly not on this lost world.
    Balkan drew his gun. He hoped to reach her ahead of the diving bird. But when he strove to run, gravity exerted an intolerable degree of force, and he feared that he would arrive too late. Now that he’d finally found her, he could not let that happen. He tried to shoot, but heard only a useless click: the weapon wasn’t working. After another try, he flung the gun to the sand, fell to his knees, closed his eyes, and released from his lungs a desperate, inhuman shout.

* * *

    “Balkan! Wake up! Damn it, wake up, please, Balkan!”
    He opened his eyes.
    A hologram of Afrika hovered above him, staring worriedly down at his prostrate form. She’d probably tried to shake him awake—in vain.
    “They should make holograms capable of touching people,” he told her groggily, pulling free of the terror of his nightmare.
    “Obviously, you weren’t sleeping well,” Afrika’s hologram said.  
    “Hardly, dear Afrika. If only you could touch me when you need to wake me.”
    The hologram smiled.
    Balkan stood. He was almost naked, and Afrika lowered her eyes while he put on his trousers and a shirt.
    Although only an imperfect tridimensional image, her hologram conveyed all the beauty of the woman. In fact, the owner of that perfect body was millions of miles away from his spaceship, just as she was from all the other vessels with which she remained in continual contact. And so Afrika could wear any sort of clothing that she wished without having to face the inevitable consequences of her choice.
    The short, teasing dress that she now wore met the approval of the Commanders of the Fleet, because research suggested that keeping its males under continuous sexual stimulus increased the aggressiveness of the Terminators, making them more industrious and productive.
    But this stimulus, at least in the case of Afrika, had exactly the opposite effect on Balkan, who, when he spoke to her, remembered how much he loved life. Indeed, every time he beheld her, even as a hologram, he understood again that the visionary promise of a lovely woman was the most exquisite boon that existence could deliver to a man. This realization often helped him forget the reason why he was there, allowing him to dream of freely setting forth on the first available hyper-luminal ship to reach that superb black woman, a descendant of the ancient stocks first selected for the pleasure houses of the farthest systems. He’d ask her to watch with him the sun sinking in the western ocean of his own planet. This notion deceived him into believing that he could still live like a man destined to love a woman of his own kind and perhaps to father children . . . rather than merely to traverse the universe wiping out other human beings.
    With difficulty, he halted the whirl of his thoughts.
    “Did the target move?” He hoped for a negative answer that would cancel or delay the duty she wished him to perform.
    “Your target today is Starsat 44, a permanent weather station orbiting a planet not far from here.”
    He grimaced. “You know how I feel, do you?” He didn’t care that all their talks were being recorded. As long as he accomplished his duties, the Fleet Command had no interest in his intimate feelings.
    “All I know is that you must carry out your mission, Commander Kasparov.”
    “It’s a bad sign when you address me by my rank and surname, Afrika.”
    She nodded. “I suppose it is.”
    “Do they have defense systems?”
    “None.”
    Of course not, he rebuked himself. Why would they have weapons on a weather station? You don’t need weapons to study oceans, storms, and winds, damn you!
    “I’d like to be able to say otherwise,” Afrika said. “The need to fight and defend yourself would help you do your job more easily.”  
    “In any case, it wouldn’t be me in need of defense.”
    “Agreed.”
    Hierarchically, Afrika was not his superior. But she was a Coordinator, one whose instructions he was supposed to obey and enact.
    The Coordinators of the Fleet determined the outcome of almost any action.. They were supposed to visualize the plan of an attack on several dimensions in space and time, keeping in mind the positions of dozens of starships in different star systems, monitoring enemy movements, foreseeing responses and giving timely instructions to every ship of the Fleet. To do that, it wasn’t required to think in a rational way. It was more a matter of instinct and intuition, a non-rational mental approach that took into account unpredictable variables and allowed prompt and effective reactions. In a word, the task required an odd sort of fantasy.
    Long ago, the Fleet had discovered that women were more adept at such activities than men. Afrika was such a woman. And she was trained to deal with the psychological obstacles—ethical scruples and feelings of guilt—of the ship Commanders whose duties she helped coordinate. The so-called Terminators often fell victim to scruples and guilt feelings. Afrika was supposed to detect these and drive them from their minds, but with some officers she no longer even tried.
    Balkan, for example, was different.
    He was not a novice, but every time he had to undertake a mission, he might as well have been. He simply couldn’t get used to killing, and Afrika knew it. She and this man were much more alike than either thought. As their names implied, they were both descendants of native Terrans.
    “Afrika . . .”
    “Yes, Commander.”
    “Wouldn’t you like to know what I was dreaming of?”
    “No. Don’t think about it now. I’m sending you your target’s coordinates. End of communication, Commander.”
    Her hologram vanished—long legs, slender neck, deep black eyes, and all.

* * *

    Balkan measured the distance remaining to his target and estimated that he would reach firing position within two hours.
    If any of his comrades had been there in his stead, the mission would go much more smoothly. Once he reached the maximum firing distance, a good Terminator would take aim, lock in on the target, and fire just the right number of disintegration warheads to destroy it.
    War economy.
    A veteran would take it out while having a cup of coffee or finishing a meal.
    An explosion would brighten in deep space, its residual light would soon dim, and fragments of the target would fly outward on separate journeys to nowhere at all. A few days later, if scavengers didn’t arrive before them, Collectors from the League would show up to retrieve the corpses.
    War enterprise.
    Balkan thought that the worst job: collecting mutilated bodies from space. He recalled what a Collector had once told him: among horribly disfigured male and female corpses, one normally found a few still whole and undamaged, free of any parasitical infestation of Insects. 
    At least two or three in a hundred, he had claimed.
    Nobody understood why the Insects spared some bodies . . . perhaps because they didn’t always need to enter the human system to take control; sometimes, just to possess its mind was more than enough. In fact, maybe that was the cleanest, most effective way to control human beings, and maybe one day, if mankind lost the war, that would be the main way of infestation . . . perhaps the only one.
    After all, there was no doubt that the insects were telepathic. Several researchers believed that they had no individual identity, that they were a living collective organized as many branches of a number of lower central intelligences. Only God knew how many such intelligences existed, but given that the League had fought this war for decades and that the aliens had infested dozens of allied systems and planets, it was alleged to be an incredibly high number.
    Although different from all his comrades, even Balkan did essentially what they did—fired his shots in the dark, destroyed his target, and escaped to his next mission. He was a professional killer, just like them. 
    But the way he did it differed considerably.
    Unlike other Terminators, he never refused to communicate with the infested ship he must destroy. If any of its occupants tried to contact him, he hit the switch and talked with them. And, to beg for mercy, they almost always tried to contact him.
    He did not merely take pity on them, he firmly believed that he owed his potential victims a listening ear.
    The other Terminators did not have this problem: when they reached their targets, they had already mentally disintegrated their victims. As soon as they did so, the actual elimination of infested human beings became an obvious result of the action, the simplest and most natural step of an intellectual fait accompli. And to kill with that coldness, they had to have already killed their own humanity.
    War annihilation.
    Balkan needed to preserve his humanity, and he believed that the only way to do that was to look his victims in their eyes—to talk with them, to listen to and promise to fulfill their pleas, reporting messages to their wives, husbands, sons, friends, lovers, or parents.
    And this self-resolve made it all terribly more difficult.
    To kill the insect-infested passed among his fellow warriors as an act of extreme love, but Balkan perceived it as a murder: premeditated, reiterated, wicked, and guilt-inducing murder.
    If a man must kill another, he thought, he must do so looking into the eyes of his victim, feeling the other’s death as at least partly his own. That way, victims survive in our memories and preserve our humanity. I will murder, but I will remain a human being, or so I hope.
    Commander Balkan Kasparov had had dozens of these last-minute talks with his victims, and Fleet Command knew about and tolerated them as a weird ritual that he liked to observe with them.     What the Command didn’t know was that over the last ten years he had spent most of his off-duty time traveling through the Galaxy to keep his promises and to carry heartfelt final messages to the loved ones of those he had dutifully slain. During every journey, he sought to recover a piece of his humanity with a mother’s gratitude, a father’s wistful hug, a child’s silent tear. Sometimes he was even able to tell those people that he deserved their blame, that he had pushed the button. Most didn’t care. Most saw the earnestness of his regret and forgave him. 
    For Balkan, these trips did not only expiate his sins, they allowed him to sidestep madness.
    That day, his mission was one of the most difficult that he’d ever had to face: the termination of a defenseless weather station now stationary in its orbit. His ship’s sensors confirmed the contamination of the target and detected six human beings aboard. All six, according to his ship’s telemetry, seemed calm, displaying no trace of panic or disorder. Balkan realized that the infestation was not far along; hence, they still maintained control of a partial kind of both their bodies and their will. 
    Balkan activated the countdown for missile launch. Once he had done so, he could by no means interrupt the Termination procedure.
    The timer displayed ten minutes and started to count.
    His shipboard speakers crackled loudly, and an image from the interior of Starsat 44 appeared on the main screen: a grinning child, waving good-bye.
    Bastards, thought Balkan. This won’t help you!
    Off-screen, an adult voice spoke: “Would you move to 3D communication, please?”
    “I can’t. My ship is now in battle configuration. I’m sorry. I can’t even show you my face. But I’ll listen to you. I’ll listen to all of you.”
    “Please show yourself, sir,” the voice said. “We don’t have much time left.”
    The profile of an old man appeared. Undoubtedly the chief meteorologist of the station, he wore a gown. At first glance, he did not show any signs of the infestation of his person, but when he turned his head disclosing his face full-on, Balkan could see the blue hue under his skin, an infallible identifier of the presence of the parasite.
    The warning signal INSEKTA flashed on screen every time the sensors detected alien contamination in the faces or figures of those on the weather station. 
    The meteorologist looked stunned, almost absent. He tried to talk Balkan out of destroying them. Balkan asked the man’s name and offered to carry his final message to anyone he wished to send it.
    “I am Vren Hissanian, and I curse you!
    Balkan bowed his head.
    “May the Gods punish you for your crime!” Vren cried. “The only person I love is beside me now.”
    A woman about the same age as the man appeared onscreen. The presence of the Insect in her body revealed itself more dramatically.
    “We wish harm on you, the League, and your damn Fleet!” Vren said. “There are other solutions than killing us all! There must be!”
    Tears streamed down the woman’s face . . . black tears, a consequence of the alien metabolism of the parasite.
    “Unfortunately,” Balkan answered, “none that I know of.” He asked again if any of them wished to send a message through him. He swore he would do his best to let the recipients hear it from him in person.
    A young meteorologist appeared onscreen.
    This man explained to Balkan how to find his parents and pleaded with him to tell them that he had died in battle. As he spoke, he showed his left arm, a cylindrical mass of rotten flesh. Balkan reassured him that we would do as he asked.
    The young man thanked him. He said that he was not angry with the Commander, because he knew what the League used to do to Terminators who refused to carry out its orders.
    Then a young woman occupied Balkan’s screen. She couldn’t speak, for her mind was almost entirely under control of the parasite. He focused on her eye and enlarged the frame to identify her. The INSEKTA signal blinked furiously.
    Balkan then asked the computer connected to the League net to provide him with the names of her known relatives. He read them aloud slowly, one by one. She listened to this catalogue, and when he reached her brother’s name, she nodded.  
    Finally, the last of the six persons aboard the weather station appeared onscreen. It took seconds for the image to emerge, endlessly small fractions of time during which an optical signal left his retinas to start its run toward his cortex. Instants that expanded, taking him into a frozen space out of the time flow, a place suspended between past and future, a limbo from which dignity and the life spirit had simply vanished, defeated by an unnamed monster, a devil that Balkan couldn’t avoid facing.
    It was her.
    Johanna was staring at him, her hate for the hangman in him buried under a cold awareness of her looming death.  
    Balkan knew that she couldn’t see him, but he still felt her gaze upon him and lifted his hands to hide his face.
    Then he decided to switch his camera on and let himself be seen, but in the very next moment withdrew his hand.
    I can’t let her see me. I can’t show her who is killing her. It would be like killing her twice.
    He then turned off the audio connection, leaned forward, and wept.
    How can I do this? I can’t, I can’t . . . I just can’t!
    “I can’t do this!” he shouted with all the strength left in his lungs. The echo of this scream filled the whole ship, shaking it with terror and rage, then rebounded and pierced his body as if it were a virulent parasite.
    When Balkan looked up, she was still there, staring blindly ahead, as silent as an eroded monument.
    He lacked the courage to switch the audio connection back on. She would hear his voice, would see him even without her eyes, would feel his presence, would love him and then hate him, and at length slay his image inside herself. 
    But that would be all right—damned right, even—because he deserved to die if he accepted her death, if he destroyed the only good thing in his life. Why, why was all this happening to him? What an infamous mission! What an unbearable sacrifice! And they should have known! How could they not know Johanna was aboard this weather station? How, for God’s almighty sake, could the all-powerful League ignore that fact?
    Balkan understood. He had known it all along.
    He was the claws of the eagle that he’d seen in his nightmare. And no weapon could protect Johanna. No one could help her while she ran on the beach, shouting his name to the sea. 

* * *

    Balkan glanced at the timer display: three minutes remained. He had no power to halt the procedure, but, impotent as he was, he switched the audio channel on.
    Johanna was calling. “Commander, can you hear me?”
    Balkan held his tongue.
    “Commander, I accept your offer to convey a message on my behalf. Find Balkan Kasparov on Beta III. Tell him I have never loved anyone in my life more than I loved him. Tell him that we had no chance to be together again, and that is my fault . . . even if there was nothing that I could do to reunite us. Tell him that the time has come for him to start living his life. Thank you, Commander.”
    Balkan reached for the screen as if to save her—Johanna—from the hell to which the League had consigned her.
    Two minutes later, a blistering light filled his eyes.
    The eagle reached its prey, and Balkan fell forward, senseless.
    The evening tide reached his body; unfeeling waves lifted it and pushed it toward the rocks.
    The planet’s second sun was setting.
    Soon, the Collectors would come.

Tempus fugit

That morning, Marco found it harder than usual to wake up.
For a few moments, he thought the alarm’s protracted beeping was the epilogue of a bad dream. But it was no dream. The night had passed in a twinkling, and on such short nights dreams rarely occur. 
He got up and took a cold shower. He dressed and had breakfast looking out the window facing the Tiber. On that winter Sunday, Rome looked more beautiful than ever. While dawn spread gently over the still sleeping city, he prepared to go out.
An exciting day loomed ahead: the beautiful girl from Bucharest whom he had met yesterday in Villa Borghese had asked him to meet her in front of her hotel. The night before, they’d had dinner in Trastevere, but when she said goodbye, he had not dared to accompany her back to that hotel. He was a disaster with women. Luckily, they always lent him a helping hand: once home, he had found a card in his pocket, written in block capitals:

AVOID THIS GIRL:  TANYA,
ANTICO IMPERO HOTEL,
PIAZZA DELL’AMORE, 11.00 A. M.

So this morning he ran from his house, happy at the prospect of seeing her again. And when he got home that evening, he was exhausted.
What a fantastic day they’d had. And how beautiful was Tanya! Her kisses played on his lips like warm wind and ocean spray, her sweet, tender ankles seemed made for his hands, and her big green eyes stopped his breath.
They had made love all day.
Before falling asleep, Marco regretted the speed, like a fast-forwarded movie, with which the day had passed. When you feel that good, he thought, time runs from you. What a shame. He longed to spend days and days in bed with this girl.
Early the next morning, Marco went looking for her, but apparently she had left. Oddly, no one at her hotel remembered the girl who had occupied room 777 until the day before. How could such a beauty pass unnoticed? 
It’s a different guy at the reception desk this morning, he thought.
“I started this morning, sir” the clerk said apologetically.
A shiver bolted down Marco’s spine. Had he dreamt everything? Or, worse, had he simply fantasized his time with Tanya? God, no! His memories were vivid, intense, warm. He could still smell her fragrant amber skin, but a full day had slipped by, or two, or maybe.  . . three?
On Wednesday evening, Marco had dinner with friends, but remained stunned and confused, still thinking of Tanya. Why had she left? She hadn’t told him goodbye, she had not even mentioned that she was leaving.
The next morning, feeling more and more lost, he asked himself, What day is this? It took some time to answer his question: it was Friday, but Friday of the following week. Eleven days had passed?
No, it was impossible. Although he tried, Marco could not remember what had happened during that time; a few traces lingered in his memory, but only vague and fragmented ones: several hours in his office, a football game, a hospital visit to his sister. Sadly, these recollections were insufficient to fill the whole timeframe. Damn, eleven days! What else had he done during that time?
My days all resemble one another, he thought depressingly.
The following night, suddenly feeling very hot, he awoke. Weird temperature for February, he thought groggily and took the occasion to visit the toilet. 
The next morning he switched on his TV to watch the news and sat at the table for breakfast. It was still miserably hot. The news announcer wished him a good morning and reported that it was May sixteenth.
Marco sprang up, eyes wide, spine shivering, hands a-tremble; his voice, when he tried to shout, gurgled in his throat. Surely, he’d gone to sleep on a cold winter’s night. Even if he’d nearly lost count, it still had to be the twelfth of February!
What the hell was going on?
He called his best friend, Andrea, and asked for his psychotherapist’s telephone number. Then, when he called this doctor, day turned to night.
He arrived at the psychotherapist’s office in late August, the streets sticky from the intense heat, but when he came back out, leaves were falling from the trees and a soft carpet of yellow already blanketed the asphalt. Was he going crazy?
Later, his therapist speculated about his symptoms, but none of his explanations was pleasant. He prescribed a sleeping medication and made Marco an appointment for the following week.
Marco met this obligation, but when he returned, the weather had turned cold again, and Christmas lights and ornaments decorated all the streets and trees. Even worse, the doctor told him that they had already reached the fourth month of his psychotherapy, although they had made little progress—indeed, almost none.
That I already know, Marco thought.
He bought a gift for Tanya. On their one day together he had gotten her address, and he sent his present to her in Romania.
After a few days, he received a letter from her. In it, she thanked him, saying that she remembered him well, even though so much time had passed. She also told him that it was funny to have received a Christmas gift near Easter; it could be a fault of the Italian postal service or possibly that of her own country.  
In his own sense of things, Marco had loved Tanya only a few days past, but, in fact, more than a year had gone by.
He was astonished.
Sometimes he woke wearing a noticeable beard; others, with different hair cuts. He often found himself in places or cities that he didn’t remember visiting; he discovered that his brother had immigrated to the United States and that he had somehow missed his mother’s second marriage . . . to a man who had become his beloved stepfather. 
Few alternatives existed: either he was crazy, or the whole universe was mocking him. Because even the latter hypothesis signaled a severe mental disorder, the former was the one to choose.
In May, then, Marco was hospitalized in a mental care unit, where he learned that he had been an in-patient for the past three years. But July came only two days later, and soon after, although God knew when, the hospital discharged him.
The following thirty days felt to him like hell on earth.
Under his gaze, the flow of time kept accelerating. He stared helplessly at his body growing older and older. His clothes changed from minute to minute. Everything moved at impossible speed.
Marco was now twenty-five years older than when he had met Tanya.  
One day, now mature but still very charming, she came to Rome for a weeklong visit. It was the only happy time that Marco had, but it lasted for only minutes, maybe, as far as he could perceive, just an hour. 
He was next to exploding.
Years slipped by, disguised as days, and science kept advancing. By this time an old man, he opened the phone directory and stumbled upon an ad that drew his attention:

Professor Andreas Kronos Zeit
Time-hole mending
Service delivered to your door

As soon as he closed the directory, his doorbell rang, but six hours had actually passed. A small, bald man with a snub nose stood in his door, staring at him with his tiny black pupils magnified by the thick lenses of his glasses.
“Uhm. You must be the one who called me,” he said, showing excellent intuition.  He entered and set down his heavy briefcase.
He explained that intense emotions can cause sudden leaks in the flow of time. In Marco’s case, they had no doubt happened as a consequence of his passionate youthful adventure with Tanya. “You are following a straight line that shears off out all the curves in your life; you are able to live only at the points of intersection, but you miss all the intermediate segments.”
The professor was perfectly clear: if Marco continued in that way, he would soon fall into the sea of time and plunge into the last days of his life.
Marco pleaded desperately for help.
Professor Kronos Zeit said there were two ways to manage his case, one simple and the other vastly more complicated. 
The simple way would be to restore time’s normal flow, so that life could resume its usual speed, but only since the moment of the intervention. That way, he would lose all his past life forever, but the intervention’s efficacy was guaranteed.
The more complicated way would transport Marco back to his youth, to exactly the day before he made love to the girl who had changed his life. By so doing, all his life would be restored, but he absolutely must, at all cost, avoid meeting her at the hotel and making love to her. It was hard for Marco to decide what to do. Tanya represented the best part of his life, but because he wished to reclaim his youth, he opted for the more complicated way.
Professor Kronos Zeit recorded all the details that Marco could recall about his youthful relationship with the girl: her name, the name of the hotel, the day and the hour they met. Then he made an appointment with him to start the process.
“I’ll see you in my office next year” the doctor said.
“What?” Marco yelled. “Why must I wait so long?”
“Don’t worry. From your perspective, it’s just going to be six or seven minutes.”
“Uh, right. Thank you, professor.”
A year later, everything was ready. Marco lay on the couch, closed his eyes and began to hope. Because, once he returned to his youth, he would lose all memory of what had since happened to him, Professor Kronos Zeit put a useful card in his pocket:

AVOID THIS GIRL:  TANYA,
ANTICO IMPERO HOTEL,
PIAZZA DELL’AMORE, 11.00 A. M.

Michael Lawson Bishop: aliens, pleistocene and the human being today

Michael Lawson Bishop, USA, born 1945, twice awarded Nebula and four times Locus, author of dozens of SF and Fantasy novels and stories (many of which translated and published in Italy), and today, looking for a publisher for his brand new contemporary novel.

Michael (website here) very kindly accepted to release this interview. In his words we have found an extremely interesting and original point of view, not only from a merely literary pespective.

In this interview Michael has proved he's one of those individuals who are not only the most admired in modern science fiction and fantasy literature, but also reveal acute sensitivity, deep respect for their readers, openness to discuss and criticize previous works and... willing to grow. Still.

F. Dear Michael, thank you for your time. I am honored to have the opportunity to pose my questions to you.
These are the first lines from Wikipedia on you: “Michael Lawson Bishop is an award-winning American writer. Over four decades and thirty books, he has created a body of work that stands among the most admired in modern science fiction and fantasy literature.” You have won Nebula twice, Locus Award four times and had various nominations for the Hugo. Would you like to comment? How do you tend to consider yourself in SF?

M. I feel fortunate that I still have such a reputation in the sf and fantasy fields, primarily because I’ve focused so much of my attention, over the past several years, on writing other kinds of work, principally contemporary stories that I find it hard to market (although a few have found homes in literary magazines) and a mainstream novel set in the early 1980s that has received many, many “respectful rejections,” as my agent sardonically terms them.

F. You received a Bachelor’s and then a Master’s degree in English. At what age did you start writing? Was that by chance, or was it planned? And, why SF?

M. I started writing with the conviction that one day I’d become a real writer in the seventh grade, I believe, when I was twelve or thirteen years old. At that point my favorite writers were Edgar Allen Poe, Jack London, and a host of authors of young-adult dog stories, like Marshall Saunders, Albert Payson Terhune, Eric Knight, and Jack O’Brien. I started writing fantasy, or horror, in large measure because I later graduated to the work of H. G. Wells and Ray Bradbury, among others.

F. Anthropological and exoticist themes are a fundamental part of your work since your very first novel ("A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire"), rewritten and republished 5 years later as "The Eyes of Fire". Is there a specific reason for this peculiar interest as a writer?

M. I had a terrific course in anthropology at the University of Georgia, in Athens, Georgia, with a professor by the name of Charles Hudson, who wrote a landmark work on the Indians of the American Southeast. In his course I read Colin Turnbull’s remarkable study of the pygmies in the Ituri rain forest in the Congo, "The Forest People", and that book and Hudson’s enthusiasm for his subject fueled my interest in other cultures, other peoples, and the adaptive ingenuity of human beings in extreme environments, whether jungle, desert, or taiga.

F. You have probably been told dozens of times that U. K. Le Guin and you share a certain way to look at human beings. A common anthropological approach. Do you think it is true? And more generally, who are sci-fi and non sci-fi authors, if any, that you consider important or have loved in particular?

M. After I began reading sf deliberately – my own program of self-education in the field, one could say – I found the work of writers who took an anthropological approach congenial to my imagination. Among these, I’d count Ursula K. Le Guin, of course, especially her Hugo- and Nebula-winning novel "The Left Hand of Darkness", but also such precursors as Wells ("The Time Machine"), George P. Elliott (“Among the Dangs”), and Chad Oliver (a host of anthropologically savvy stories). But Le Guin remains a favorite, and a story like “The Word for World Is Forest” resonates with me even today, probably because it manages to evoke my private debt to Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People while simultaneously making a strong necessary statement about the waste and the basic immorality of the Vietnam War in which the United States was then enmired.

Let me add as a footnote that I have always loved Jonathan Swift’s "Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts by Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships". These four voyages, whose recounting Swift of course attributes to Gulliver, offer grist for more than four acute ethnographies of several fanciful societies, and so I regard this satirical work as an imaginative foundational anthropological study. You cannot read it without astonishment, nor can you reread it without hitting upon something seemingly brand-new to your apprehension.

F. The growing need of a dialogue between different cultures in the world in the 70’s probably stimulated and encouraged sci-fi writers to be particularly sensitive to these themes? Can you comment? What is left of that attitude as of today?

M. I began writing at a time when sf writers – especially those who inaugurated or became involved in the New Wave movement of the early to mid 1960s through the early ’70s – recognized the wisdom of taking a more cosmopolitan approach to their subject matter. How could they write about sentient species on other worlds without weighing the demonstrable fact that our Anglo-American culture constituted a very small percentage of human activity – art, language, music, agriculture, scientific discovery, and self-sustainability strategies – here on Earth? How could we explore other solar systems, other galaxies, and/or the nature of infinity, in short, without first deliberately exploring the contributions of our own species, far and wide, to our longed-for, curiosity-fueled drive to the stars?

At this point, however, I can’t claim any special insight into what motivates or excites sf and fantasy writers today, although I believe our former emphasis on space exploration has fallen prey to the economic demoralization of much of the world and to the difficulties that protracted manned spaceflight has made clear to us. As a result, it now often seems that fantasy has displaced science fiction as the premier imaginative literature in the marketplace. Even though I never or only rarely qualify as a writer of hard science fiction, I do regret that development a little. Although I believe that good writers have written fantasies of compelling quality and lasting worth – John Crowley’s "Little, Big for one" – I also usually find that many writers using fantasy or horror tropes (elves, fairies, ogres, vampires, werewolves, zombies, etc.) seldom lift them out of the literary recesses of predictability and/or outright ludicrousness.

F. "Eyes of fire" addresses the issues deriving from inter-cultural differences and relevant chances of reconciliation. What is your personal definition of “diversity”? Can hurdles to co-existence be overcome (and how)? In other words, can “humanity” in general be the only real critical factor which is ideally able to abolish all kind of barriers, or does necessarily one cultural / national / religious identity conflict with the others by definition?

M. I have never really thought about positing a personal definition of “diversity.” I would instead argue that diversity, here on Earth, exists as an unignorable fact. We ignore it at our peril. Some cultural barriers to mutual understanding we can overcome, however, by learning other languages (an area in which I am, I regret to admit, deficient); visiting other places; reading other countries’ stories and poetry (in the original or in translation); living for an extended time among people racially, ethnically, religiously, and culturally different from ourselves; and resolving to find at least as much good, useful, and aesthetically enriching in what we encounter as we expect to find useless, baffling and distasteful. We need to step outside the circle of our own biases, tastes, and egos, a step that most of us resist as discomfiting if not wholly impossible. Even if we manage to do so, though, we won’t break down every barrier, and we may even discover that a few practices – our own or others’ – militate against complete acceptance, if not understanding, of the objects of our study because these practices seem evil to us in ways that we can tolerate only if we eviscerate our own identities: a problem at the very heart of the current conflict between the industrialized West and some militant factions of Islam.

F. In the novel "Transfigurations", derived from a shorter novella, which was nominated for Hugo and Nebula Awards, you’ve described a sort of “involution” of an intelligent race.
The story is very intriguing: the reader struggles to understand what happened both to the Asadi population and to missing Professor Chaney. Because of this sort of “regression” of the Asadi, they have lost their intelligence and have gradually fallen to a condition where they still show a “social” behavior with ancient signs of their culture emerging in rites and ceremonies, including cannibalism, which you’ve described in a very realistic and uncensored way. Humans who hate them treat them like animals. Loss of rationality would then be equivalent to a regression to an animal-like condition? What is your thought? And can you speculate on the condition into which the Asadi have fallen?

M. I would call it a variety of “devolution,” but your assessment of the process that the Asadi undergo in this story also serves. Still, I wouldn’t declare that every species’ loss of its faculty of rationality, or mental computational power, would necessarily result in a creature wholly animalistic, in our most derogatory use of that adjective. I can almost imagine a species that might “devolve” to a state enabling it to live more calmly and efficiently in its environment than it did as a so-called rational creature, but as a rational creature whose greater brain power led it to aggressively worry every obstacle in ways that actually threatened its survival. (Isn’t that picture, in fact, a shorthand portrait of Homo sapiens sapiens?)

As for the Asadi, they are an enigma, designed as an enigma, capable of either evolving to intelligence again or falling away to extinction. The presence of humanity on their world may doom them to the latter fate, if the beginning of my story fails to suggest that they are doomed already.

F.How does this mesh with Darwinism?

M. To be completely honest, the devolution of the Asadi may not have very solid scientific underpinnings. I think (and remember that I now view his particular story from a perspective of almost forty years) that I meant this alien species to represent a degraded version of our own humanity, a dramatic metaphor for all the ways that we human beings foul our own nest, subvert our own intelligence, and undermine even our best intentions. In the early 1970s I was undoubtedly thinking of the Vietnam War, racial tensions, the oil crunch, etc., but today I could as easily point to the ongoing oil-spill calamity in the Gulf of Mexico, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the worldwide monetary crisis, among other pending issues. So how can I argue that the Asadi reflect Darwinism, when, in fact, they have their origins not only in my fascination with anthropology but also in my literary debt to the great English-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift?

F. Let’s move to your masterpiece, "No Enemy but Time". I loved it. This is one of the 5 or books I would take with me to a desert island. There’s a lot of your life inside this book, isn’t it? A father in the USAF, an important role of Spain . . .

M. Yes, several portions of the novel take their inspiration from life, primarily the year that I spent in Spain with my father from the summer of 1962 to the early summer of 1963. (Thank you, by the way, for describing No Enemy but Time as my masterpiece, an evaluation that I appreciate from you even though I’d point to Ancient of Days or possibly Brittle Innings as more successful works of fiction. Further, I have an unpublished contemporary novel that strikes me as even better than these. At the same time, I perceive all these novels as flawed in different, demoralizing ways that defy correction . . . at least by me.)

My dad was stationed at a Strategic Air Command base about thirty miles from Seville, or Sevilla, in Morón de la Frontera, but we lived in an apartment in downtown Sevilla, in a 3-story building at 15 Leoncillos. We had the second floor (which many Europeans would call the first floor), our landlords lived on the first floor (at ground level), and an American airman named Pete Tanaguchi, his German-born wife Ilsa, and their little girl, Nisei, lived on the third floor [to most Europeans, the second floor]; we all washed clothes on the roof and had a fairly clear view of La Giralda, the lofty tower of the city’s enormous Gothic cathedral. Even so, all the anthropological content of No Enemy but Time comes from my reading of in-the-field paleoanthropologists like Louis B. Leakey, Mary Leakey, their son Richard Leakey, and the Leakey family’s rival hunter of proto-hominid fossils, Donald Johansson. I did a powerful amount of research for this book, but the characterization of its people derived from personal experience or close observation, of a combination of the two.

F. The kind of time travel you have invented in this book seems totally original to me. I think I have never read about time travel based on a sort of “memory” in the flow of time, and aimed at reaching the pre-historic era…

M. The idea also involved the alleged susceptibility of the time traveler to what sleep researchers call vivid dreaming. It’s an imaginative notion, but one not firmly grounded in science and hence a possible flaw in the novel. I could also cite the unexpected dues-ex-machina appearance of Zarakali (a fictional african modern country) astronauts in that Pleistocene dream country as another flaw, given that my main character and the Air Force’s time-transference device have conjured this ghost territory from his sleeping consciousness. Nowadays, if you’ll forgive me, I cringe a little when I read these sections of the book.

F. From an exoticist anthropology to paleoanthropology, from aliens to habilines, and in a way the story goes on in "Ancient of days" (which includes the Locus Award winner novella Her habiline husband), a book which is not available in Italian. Why this passage? And are you interested in the Pleistocene epoch?

M. Over time (as others have noted), I have moved from setting my stories on other planets in exotic, far-removed solar systems to setting them on recognizable places here on Earth. I am still interested in the Pleistocene, yes, but far more interested in trying to track the development of our humanity from the earliest origins of our species to the present day.
"Ancient of Days", for example, follows an intelligent specimen of Homo habilis (maybe too blatantly named Adam), the scion of a lost group of such creatures on an island off the coast of Haiti, as he struggles to earn acceptance among 21st-century Americans in the southeastern United States. I actually prefer this novel to Enemy, by the way, and let me add that the three interrelated novellas comprising its contents work together to create a thematic, if not a linear, sequel to the earlier novel. Just as the human protagonist in Enemy comes to recognize the habilines as more than just funny bipedal soul mates, so do the two principal human protagonists of Ancient of Days come to see Adam as one of them, indeed even as their intellectual and moral superior.

F. It seems to me that this book was a milestone in the evolution of your intellectual work. In other words, this seems a story of sincere faith in the power of human being.
Joshua finds more humanity among “habilines” than dealing with modern humans. Habilines do not speak. Their intelligence is poor. Their capacity to escape danger is the same as animals. They just survive. They are always afraid. But, they have human feelings. I have almost cried at the description of the accident where one of them shoots himself with Joshua’s gun. And also, a very touching scene is when Joshua makes love with his habiline “wife”, and falls in love with her. This historical “regression” is very different from what the Asadi suffered. It looks like the question on what defines a human being eventually found its answer in such a book… the sparkle of humanity is not rationale thinking. It is emotion, it’s the irrational, like friendship, love, or even hate, and jealousy. The non-logical aspects of the intelligence. Please let us know your thought.

M. I don’t at all mean to sidestep your question, but I can answer it only by saying that I believe you have tagged the source of habiline humanity in No Enemy but Time, namely, “the non-logical aspects of the intelligence,” theirs and ours, although scientists would look closely at the near-similarity of habiline and human genetic makeup and also the ability of the two species to produce viable, fertile offspring (an ability that I assumed on faith, not on any solid scientific evidence). I find it gratifying, though, that you accepted the habilines as human on the basis of their poignant interactions with Joshua and of course with others of their own band.

F. Western philosophy, from ancient Greece to Illuminism, (not to mention Christianity) is based and on the idea that every human being is affected by a sort of evil (call it insanity, violence, aggressiveness, or any negative original nature) since its birth, and that only rational thinking lets us control it through restraining of excessive emotions. In "No Enemy but Time" you seem to go far beyond such a perspective: in your stories human beings seem naturally brought to behave and move one towards the other, and not one against the other…

M. That may seem so, on the basis of the observable narrative events, and much of this intraspecies congeniality in NEBT does derive from what I view as a natural reluctance of human beings to kill others similar to them . . . without deliberate pedagogy to reverse that reluctance, as in military boot camps, terrorist training camps, and spring football practice. (A poor sort of joke.) (Forgive me.) On the other hand, Joshua and the habilines bond because he makes an effort to prove himself a friend and they discover no reason to assume him worth either eating or exiling. Often, extant conditions – about which we can do very little – decide whether two visibly similar creatures will fight or unite.

F. On the other hand, a novel like "Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas" (where you depicted a dystopic future world), as it’s an homage to PKD, clearly tells us your admiration for this writer, whose thought on human beings was much more negative . . .

M. I believe that Philip K. Dick had a great deal of faith in what he might have called “the little man,” that is, that human being who, while lacking great political, religious, or military power, still carries on doing what he or she is supposed to do, whether casting pots, making jewelry, or being diplomatic, even though the world, or evil others, conspires against their modest creativity, and even though reality itself sometimes seeks to subvert them. I admire Dick not for any negative view of humanity he may or may not have entertained, but for his invariably creating heroes, male or female, as persons seeking to put away their weakness in favor of their strengths, despite the overwhelming odds against them. They have a nobility that Persons with Real Power often seem altogether devoid of.

F. "Who made Stevie Crye?", "Count Geiger’s Blues", and "Brittle Innings" represent totally different kinds of work, with comic, fantasy and horror themes… sometimes mixed together…

M. Actually, "Who Made Stevie Crye?" functions as a stand-alone send-up of the horror novels, particularly Stephen King’s "Cujo" that were so popular at about the time that I was writing it. Predictably, Stephen King thought it a virulent attack on him and his body of work, whereas I meant it more as a more or less serious attack on King’s many imitators and as a gentle ha-ha at the ludicrous excesses of one particular Steven King novel. The book has its admirers; in fact, it wound up on a published book listing “The 100 Best Fantasy Novels,” but it could never find a paperback publisher here in the States and is now out of print both here and in England.
"Count Geiger’s Blues", like "Ancient of Days" and the early novella “Death and Designation Among the Asadi,” has a deliberate satirical superstructure. The targets here are comic-book superheroes and the persistent comic-book notion that radiation accidents can somehow imbue those they touch with miraculous abilities, an idea that gets full play in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel "Watchman", specifically in the character of Doctor Manhattan. In fact, "Count Geiger’s Blues" owes a great deal to both Watchman and Michael Chabon’s remarkable Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay". I subtitle the book “A Comedy,” with a tip of the cap to Dante and to William Saroyan, but its conclusion demonstrates the folly of believing radiation a wholly benign phenomenon.
"Brittle Innings" centers on the world of professional baseball in the Deep South (the American Deep South) during World War Two. It is also, by design, a sequel to Mary Shelley’s "Frankenstein". I had fun writing this book, but also expended a lot of sweat researching its background and working out various plot elements. In fact, I devised a complete 1943 summer schedule for a minor-league baseball team, the Highbridge Hellbenders, for which both my narrator, Danny Boles, and his grotesque and mysterious roommate, Hank Clerval, play at the height of the war. Twentieth Century Fox purchased this novel for a film, but could never find a director to spearhead the project. Now out of print in the United States, "Brittle Innings" remains a personal favorite among my novels.

F. How do you deal with “fantasy” genre? I am also thinking of "Unicorn Mountain".

M. This book sprang from my intense interest in the AIDS epidemic of the early 1980s, my admiration for the work of Philip K. Dick, and my fascination with the American Indians of southwestern Colorado, the Utes. The novel posits a species of unicorn that crosses into contemporary Colorado from another dimension, a species afflicted with a unicorn-specific form of equine fever akin to the human AIDS virus in its genetic makeup. It also uses Indian magic – the Ute pole dance – as a plot element. At this late date, I can’t reformulate my daily approach to developing the novel, but do know that if anyone were to express interest in republishing it, I would insist on revising the text – tightening it and gentling some of its overwrought dialogue.

F. Are you religious? Do you believe in God? What main cultural factors can you identify in your education and culture as a man and as an artist/writer?

M. If you will send me your mailing address, Francesco, I will send you a copy of an anthology that I edited for Thunder’s Mouth Press, a collection entitled "A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-five Imaginative Tales about the Christ". The introduction of this book will tell you just about everything you want to know about my religious beliefs, maybe even more than you wish to know.

F. I think it is the one including "Behold the Man" by Moorcock… if this is the spirit of the book, I think I will simply fall in love with it, and look forward to receiving the anthology, obviously a signed copy…

M. The anthology does indeed include the original novella version of Moorcock’s “Behold the Man,” very slightly abridged. Others stories in the volume include Isaac Babel’s “The Sin of Jesus,” Borges’s “The Gospel According to Mark,” my own adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamazov (titled “The Inquisitor General” in A Cross of Centuries), Oscar Wilde’s “The Selfish Giant,” and a host of stories, some original, by well-known American writers, including Ray Bradbury, Jeffrey Ford, Karen Joy Fowler, Paul Di Filippo, the late Henry Kuttner (with the title story), Barry Malzberg, Jack McDevitt, and Mike Resnick, among others. I also have two brief stories in the volume, “Sequel on Skorpios” and “Miriam.” And I will definitely inscribe and sign the copy that I send to you, Francesco.

F. Thank you! Can you tell us something about your unpublished contemporary novel?

My unpublished contemporary novel, “An Owl at the Crucifixion”, continues to seek a home, and I still have mild hopes that it will see print in my lifetime. It concerns a teenage boy named Jude Huckaby (fourteen when the main action of the novel starts), who accidentally learns that his high school drama teacher and his youth group's Sunday school teacher, Piet Scarboro, has a male lover. Jude's father serves as pastor of the United Methodist Church in Chinaberry, Georgia, in 1980, and Jude's discovery precipitates a series of events that change Mister Piet's life forever. I think that's all I care to say about the novel at this point.
Oh, yes, I'll add here that Peter Crowther in England has just accepted a 7,000-word chapter from the novel, "Unfit for Eden," for the magazine that his own PS Publishing releases once or twice a year. "Unfit for Eden" is told in the first-person by Piet's lover, Dwight David Colter, who grew up as a Jehovah's Witness in a hamlet on the edge of the Okefinokee Swamp in Georgia. This virtually self-contained chapter has no overt fantasy element, but a feverish narrative drive that may -- let me stress, may -- disguise suggest otherwise to some of its readers.

F. I know you are now teaching a fiction-writing course at LaGrange College in Georgia. How is it to teach writing? Is writing something you can learn from zero? What’s the balance between technique and talent?

M. I think that a creative-writing course can indeed teach others how to write a well-crafted work of fiction and/or a well-crafted poem. It cannot teach genius, of course, but some people, if they work hard enough, may in time create stories, novels, and/or poems virtually indistinguishable in quality from writers of both talent and genius . . . although this conflation of events occurs rarely, just as genius itself occurs rarely. In my writing classes at LaGrange College, I use Anne Lamott’s insightful strategy of giving the students “short assignments” and allowing them to produce, indeed to expect, “shitty first drafts,” so that they can learn from their mistakes and so thoroughly clean up those drafts as to make them acceptable to . . . well, to Editors.

F. What are your suggestions for people who want to become sci-fi writers?

Read a lot. Read a lot of sf. Write a lot. Write a lot of sf. Fail at writing. Fail at writing sf. Try again. And fail better. That’s not my formulation of the best way to break in as any kind of writer, but it seems the only sensible way to proceed, even though it may, and most likely will, take a while. Hang in there.

F. Last but not least. You also write poetry. A SF writer and a poet. How do these two things interact with each other?

M. It depends on whether one incorporates poetry into one’s sf or writes poetry that has science-fictional subject matter. In any case, I don’t see any real conflict or incompatibility between the two vocations.

(photograph taken in Seville by Serena Barbacetto)

(to read the Italian version of this interview, please click HERE)

"Science fiction can do anything literature can do, and then some."

After her worldwide success novel "The time traveler's wife", and waiting for the movie based on it, Audrey Niffenegger reveals inedited aspects of the story. Eclectic personality, writer, artist, illustrator, creative writing teacher, Audrey released this interview on Dec 6th 2008.

2008, Francesco Troccoli, all rights reserved.

Hello, Audrey and first of all thank you for your time. Let me express all my admiration both from a reader’s and writer’s perception. The TTW is really a great work, not only within a “genre” view. I know several people, including myself, who really enjoyed reading it and I am buying more copies as Christmas gifts.

Thank you.

In an interview you said that “you were worried it would never get published as the title makes it seem traditional SF while it isn’t SF enough for genre-fans”. In Italian libraries you cannot find this book on SF shelves. It’s in mainstream. But I think it actually is SF, and I can say that SF fans are in love with the story. I know you do not consider important this kind of distinction, but can you tell us your perspective?

I do think it is SF (after all, it is a time travel story) but the center of gravity is the relationship between the main characters, and the book is fundamentally an examination of a marriage. I think that the best science fiction has all the qualities of “literature” plus that extra, speculative thought-experiment aspect. SF can do anything “literature” can do, and then some.

Are you a SF reader? (If yes, can you mention your favorite authors?)

I am, but I never seem to be up on all the SF news; I’m just now getting around to watching the new Doctor Who series, for example. My current favorites are Kelly Link and Geoff Ryman. And H. G. Wells has been a major influence. Black Water, a collection of fantastic stories edited by Alberto Manguel, would be one of my desert island books.

SF has often been a typical male territory, even if we know there are phenomenal female writers. And female SF writers are very different from male ones. Rhythm is calmer, even in dramas, and narration is smoother and sometimes more intense. And genre rules almost become an “excuse” for a psychological exploitation of characters and plot. I think it is also your case. Anyway, have you read any of them, like Lois McMaster Bujold or Ursula K. Le Guin?

I read Ursula K. Le Guin many years ago, for a class in high school, actually. But I never got very into her work. I am an ardent fan of Susanna Clarke and also of Margaret Atwood.

And what are your favorite mainstream authors?

Of course, everyone I named above has been claimed by the mainstream. I would add Richard Powers, Wesley Stace, Henry James (who wrote ghost stories and time travel stories), Dorothy Sayers, Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickenson, G.W. Dahlquist, Martin Amis, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Donna Tartt, and Chris Adrian.

Let’s go to the story. I think the “paradox” of Henry meeting so many times a younger/older his self is a key factor in the plot. But on the other hand, this is completely different from the majority of time travel stories, where meeting yourself in the past or the future is a sort of “taboo”, which might cause alterations in the flow of time. What is your perspective?

I tried to eliminate paradox from the story because it would have been a distraction. So the rules are:
-everything happens only once. Nothing can be changed;
-therefore there is no reason Henry can’t meet himself, as long as nothing changes; he experiences the event as many times as there are Henrys at the event;
-because nothing can be changed, this story is a tragedy, and is true to life.

Actually the book is dark and that it was even darker originally. Reading the story it seems there is a specific plot point where things start to collapse. Until then, anything was possible. Even a happy ending (which I know you consider artificial almost always). Henry loses his feet, he is trapped in the closet in the library (which he had always feared), and so on. That is the point where the reader starts feeling sorry because it is clear that he will die after being wounded in the hunting place. Did you explore any possible different end or was this given from the very first moment you started writing?

I wrote the last two scenes of the book first. Henry’s death was always there, and in the process of writing I eventually figured out how it happened.

You said a story rule (very contradictory to traditional time travel stories) is nothing can be changed. It sounds like “pre-destination”. I mean, there is a sense of “unchangeability” of the flow of the events, and you really feel Clare and Henry are thrown down to their destiny with no alternative…

Yep. That is what happens when you eliminate paradox (see above) and when religion does not figure into the equation.

Well, in your website’s FAQ, You said you were raised catholic (like Clare in the book). Could this be connected with this sense of predetermination in some way?

Catholics believe that God gives humans free will. Hence, the woman in the garden with the snake and the apple. Certain Protestant sects believe in predestination. Clare has a hard time accepting a universe in which everything has already happened, precisely because she believes in free will. Henry struggles to cultivate a sense of free will; he tried not to know what the future will bring so he can make choices freely.

On the other hand, I think that the “real” end is happy. It is when the old Clare meets Henry for the last time. Love wins over death and bad destiny…

Yes, although she waited quite a long time for her happy ending.

Is the disease Henry has something which might represent his sub-conscious? I mean, he always leave in emotional moments (his marriage, the birth of Alba), like he cannot sustain them.

The time travel is meant to be a metaphor for memory, always glancing away from the present into the past.

Can you comment on the importance of subconscious in human beings?

It seems to me that subconscious is just another name for our real selves. We are like ice bergs; only the most superficial parts of ourselves can be seen by others. This is why fiction is so marvelous, it’s a way to get inside other people’s heads, to alleviate loneliness and to have impossible experiences. So much of what I write doesn’t make much sense to me as I write it; my subconscious is putting things together and I consciously understand later, when I edit.

Can you share with us your personal definition of “fantasy”?

To me Fantasy (in the literary sense) evokes elves and unicorns and such; Tolkien is my favorite in that realm, but I have not read very much and I know there’s lots of harder-edged Fantasy that I might like if I knew anything about it.

And more in general, a definition of "fantasy" as a human attribute?

Fantasy is all the purposeless, baroque, inchoate, pleasurable, and quite necessary thought we humans allow ourselves in the midst of our more sensible pursuits.

Is writing the art you love more, among the ones you do? Can you also comment on you as an illustrator?

Lately I’ve been working in the medium of comics, which has been perfect since it marries words and images. I would love to do more of that. My comic, The Night Bookmobile, has been running in the London Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/nightbookmobile

The thing I love best is whatever I am working on at the moment. I am trained as an artist; I learned to write in school but mostly from reading other writers’ novels. So I am probably more versatile in visual arts, but I find writing more direct and easier.

You said in an interview that you will probably be disappointed by the results of the movie (director: Gus Van Sant, featuring Eric Bana and Rachel Mc Adams, produced by Brad Pitt). Has something happened in the meantime to make you change your mind? (by the way do you have news about the timing of the release?)

The director is Robert Schwentke. The movie is finished, as far as I know, and will be released some time in 2009. I am not involved with it, so I don’t really have any inside information. I hate people who comment on movies they haven’t seen (don’t you?) and since I have not seen it, I’m going to wait till it’s out before I say anything about it.

I read your current job is teaching students how to write. This is gorgeous. Do you think (good) writing is more a talent or something everyone can learn?

I do have a gorgeous job; I teach artists to write so they can put their art and writing together. My class is part of the Book and Paper Arts MFA program at Columbia College in Chicago, so the students are book artists.
I think that most people can tell a compelling story, and most people can learn to be competent writers. Good writing requires sensitivity to the reader and that is one of the things a student can get from a writing class: a sense of whether they are having the effect they think they are having.

Lastly, what is the status of you 2nd book, Her Fearful Symmetry, and the novella, The Chincilla girl in exile ?

Her Fearful Symmetry is almost finished; it will most probably be published next fall. The Chinchilla Girl in Exile will become part of a short story collection, I don’t know when that will be done, but thank you for asking. Sometimes I think I am the slowest writer in the world.

As far as I could understand Her Fearful Symmetry will be a sort of gothic novel, correct? Do you think SF readers will enjoy it?

It is another genre-crossing thing: it’s a ghost story, and certainly partakes of the gothic in certain ways, but it is not particularly scary. It’s mainly about relationships forming and coming undone, about the difficulties of communicating even with people you know intimately, and about the dangers of getting what you want.

Many thanks for your time, and Happy New Year.

Pics from forthcoming movie: here

Sources:

http://www.audreyniffenegger.com/

http://writerunboxed.com/2006/03/10/interview-audrey-niffenegger/

http://contemporarylit.about.com/cs/authorinterviews/a/niffenegger.htm

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2003_12_001158.php

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/writers/writerdetails.asp?cid=1106335#interview

An Interview to Richard K. Morgan

RICHARD K. MORGAN

he has just finished writing his first Fantasy novel, while the third chapter of Takeshi Kovacs' cycle will be released soon in Italy. Richard K. Morgan, one of the most interesting contemporary SF authors, reveals backstage and inedited aspects of his stories.

Interview by Francesco Troccoli, all rights reserved.

Hello Richard, let’s start with a simple question: any idea on how much we still have to wait in Italy for the translation of Woken Furies? And, is that the last chapter of Takeshi Kovac’s cycle?

Well, it is certainly the last chapter of the Kovacs cycle for the moment. I really feel that I’ve used up most of the potential in the character and the scenarios, and since these books have been as much about character as anything else, I think mining the potential any further is likely to have a weakening effect. Every single series character I’ve known and loved has ended up disappearing down a spiral of diminishing returns as the endless repeat novels wear them thin, and I don’t want that to happen to Kovacs. That said, if I ever have an idea for a truly strong, truly fresh novel with Kovacs in, I’ll certainly go ahead and write it. I miss the old bastard as much as anyone.

As for the Italian version of Woken Furies, if it’s not already out by the time this interview goes to press, it won’t be too long after. I’m in fairly regular contact with my Italian translator, the genre-famous Vittorio Curtoni, and others involved in the production of the book, and my understanding is that the translation is pretty much done and polished. So – not long to wait now!


Any news about the movie from Altered Carbon?

No, none really. The option has been renewed and the film is still in development – but of course that can mean anything or nothing. Keep your fingers crossed!


I think you said last year that you should hate P. K. Dick because every time you have an idea, you discovered he had it first. Furthermore, many people say the atmospheres you create can remind his - but, frankly, I can feel Kovacs is still a very decent human being, beyond his super-powers and his cynic approach to life. Do you believe in human beings?

Do I believe in human beings? Well, to be honest I don’t really have much choice – they’re all we’ve got. For me, the frustrating thing about humanity – and this is what comes out in Kovacs’ cynicism – is the appalling sense of waste, of wasted potential in how we behave. But of course that sense of waste is an illusion; we are the way we are as humans, and part of how we are is the way we aspire far beyond our (immediate) capacity to achieve. We dream of things like justice and equality for all, and then become very disillusioned when we can’t pull them out of the hat immediately. But that’s like me aspiring to run the marathon and being disappointed when I can only do a few kilometers before I collapse. Want to run a marathon? You have to train. Want a just and egalitarian society? You have to take the long view. It takes a long time to achieve anything worthwhile, and you have to be aware of your limitations as you do it. The problem is, of course, that the only cost of slow and steady training for a marathon is time and a few aches and pains (and maybe a slight decrease in my self esteem!) The cost of slow social progress, on the other hand, is measured in very real human misery, and human misery can be a hard thing to watch. The impulse to do something quick and violent to counter it is inescapable – but of course as history shows, that impulse is totally wrong-headed, completely counter-productive in ninety percent of cases. We have to understand that before we’ll get anywhere. So yes, I believe in the potential of humans to build a better world, but I think we’ll be a while getting there, and we’ll only manage it by becoming aware of our shortcomings – and that means all of us. This is a realism that has to being inside each individual.


In this dystopic future, mind can be up- and downloaded into/from the body. A certain degree of separation between body and mind is a pillar of so called western world philosophy, beginning with Plato (who believed that “ideas” are already there in the mind of a new born) and other ancient Greek philosophers, up to the XVI century with the concept by René Descartes of the separation between RES COGITANS (mind) and RES EXTENSA (body). On the other hand, in other cultures, like the Oriental ones, body and mind are much more linked to each other as to almost represent a single entity; upon this second idea, one could argue that separating body from mind (what we do in our western culture) could be cause of serious psychic diseases. Any comment? how does your thinking deal with all this?

Ultimately, Altered Carbon and its sequels are a variant on noir fiction, and noir tends to sidestep the big philosophical issues (in their overt forms, anyway) and to focus on smaller scale practicalities. Not the broad theoretical injustice of sexual oppression in general, but the suffocating sordid squalor of a single prostitute’s room. Not the injustice of war as an overarching concept, but the brutal personal experience of a single soldier in the field. And so forth…. The characters in the Kovacs novels may occasionally brood or meditate upon the bigger picture (Kovacs himself is after all highly intelligent and articulate) but they spend most of their time grappling with small-scale specifics. Hopefully, the books bring out some of the ground level impact that a separation of mind and body implies – what do you gain, what do you lose, what is the emotional and social cost of the technology? And of course, the books do imply that there is damage involved in this process at both a personal emotional and a social level – it isn’t a “clean” technology we’re talking about here.


Is mind something divine in your opinion? / Is it “superior” to body? do you believe in God?

No, I’m an atheist materialist. Mind is no more superior to body than muscle is to fat or cats are to dogs. Each serves its purpose, has its own validity, and there is a constant interrelation of influences back and forth. Our minds are formed by the bodies they find themselves in – that much is obvious. Borne into a strong body, you’re much more likely to develop a positive attitude to physical activity. Borne into a male body you’re likely to have an overdeveloped tendency towards confrontation and violent demands. And so on. But there is also feedback from this: as we get older we are constantly making mental choices which have a major impact upon the development of our physical being as well. Shall I become a boxer or not? Shall I eat too much sugary food? And so forth. It’s helpful, I think, to see mind and body not as two separate things, but as two aspects of a single ongoing physical event – that event being your life.


When mind is downloaded into a new sleeve, one could argue something very powerful happens when real light hits the eyes of a new body once again. Does this represent a sort of re-birth? how a mind will deal with a new body? what is your idea from a philosophical / psychological point of view?

Ah well, that would be telling. Gotta read the books and see for yourselves…..!

Let’s move to the other novels. Market Forces and Black Man: two types of nearest future earth. Are they intermediate steps on a way to next Kovac’s Protectorate world?

Not really, no. They have a number of ideas in common with the Kovacs books, it’s true – corporate power run wild, the colonization of Mars, central characters who are comfortable with violence. But that’s really just an indication of the areas in fiction that fascinate me. There is no intended connection beyond that.


What is the status of Land Fit for Heroes? Having read the other books, it is hard to figure out which kind of fantasy world such an author can imagine…

Land fit for Heroes (now retitled The Steel Remains, in the UK at least) is finished. I handed in the final draft last week, and it should be out in August of this year. I think the best way to describe it is as a low fantasy novel – set in a fairly standard high fantasy landscape but with characters and attitude which are the antithesis of what you’d usually expect to find in a standard high fantasy novel. It’s brutal, amoral, noirish and deserves a soundtrack by the Rolling Stones - Street Fighting Man, Gimme Shelter, Respectable, Sympathy for the Devil, stuff like that…….


Are you also spending time working on graphic novels?

Not at the moment, no. My run on Black Widow for Marvel wasn’t hugely successful (at least not in terms of sales) and I haven’t been invited to continue it. Can’t really blame them!!! I do have some good ideas for GNs and some kind editorial offers from various places, but right up until a couple of weeks ago I was too busy with The Steel Remains to give much thought to side projects. Now I’m done, and have a bit of downtime, well, we’ll see……


In an interview, you said: "Society is, always has been and always will be a structure for the exploitation and oppression of the majority through systems of political force dictated by an élite, enforced by thugs, uniformed or not, and upheld by a willful ignorance and stupidity on the part of the very majority whom the system oppresses." Does this also apply to what we use to call democracy?

Well, you could see democracy, active democracy, as an antidote to that vision. But I think in most modern nations, democracy comes under constant threat from exactly the dynamics I’ve outlined there. Look at Bush in America, Berlusconi in Italy. They both fucked democracy up the arse, and the respective populations stood by and let it happen, in some cases even applauded the rape. (In the UK, Blair did something less violent but just as sleazy – more like date rape with Rohypnol, maybe). I’m very much afraid that humans seem to be hardwired for hierarchy, xenophobia and stupidity in the face of complex issues. It’s a constant struggle to beat that tendency, to fight it back with education and justice and intelligence.


Who are you favorite sf authors? other than PKD…

In fact, Dick really isn’t a favourite of mine – I mean, I have an immense amount of respect for his incredible inventiveness, but stylistically I think he’s quite limited, and of very varied quality. That’s to be expected – when a man is jacked up on amphetamines and turning out half a dozen books a year, quality control is going to be tough to do. So while I think Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said are inspirational pieces of SF, I can’t say I’d ever go back and read either of them again from choice. William Gibson’s work, on the other hand, I can go back and read time and time again because there is an intense stylistic quality to the work that rewards repeated visits. I think Gibson still remains my favourite genre writer.


Do you see differences between the way men and women write sf stories? (I am thinking of Ursula K. Le Guin for example)…

Yes, definitely. We all bring our own individual sensibilities to the work, and I think there’s no doubt that male and female sensitivities, though often interlocking, are very different. Speaking of Le Guin, The Dispossessed is one of my favourite novels in any genre, the kind of book I would love to have written myself. But I think a male version of that novel would have been very different, and quite inferior. It would have been far angrier, far more violent, and probably ultimately far more despairing. The value of The Dispossessed is exactly that it short circuits those feelings, and gives you a sense of hope despite everything. Women are generally far better than men at hope, in life and in their writing.

Any impression about non-English language sf writers? S. Lem? M. Ende? others?

Well, possibly my favourite writer in any genre is Haruki Murakami – and I think it’s safe to say his stuff could be called SF, especially his last novel Kafka on the Shore (though saying that will no doubt scandalize a great number of mainstream critics). But in general I tend not to read that much SF in translation. It’s not a conscious choice, it’s just that there is so much genre stuff out there written in English, I’m statistically very unlikely to pick up non-English writers unless they come with very high recommendation. I have read some Lem – the Pilot Pirx stories – and thought they were pretty good, but that’s really about the full extent of my experience.


I can read in your website (which by the way I think it’s great, and the coolest thing is that it’s also a blog): “Wow - how much did some people hate Black Man/Thirteen? They hated it a LOT!” - how do you deal with readers?

As respectfully as I can. For me writing is an act of (or at least an attempt at) communication. My books have things to say as well as a story to tell, and the hope is that the reader picks up at least some of that along the way. You’re trying to provoke an emotional response, but also some thought, some reflective consideration. When that works, when readers “click” with the book, it’s a great feeling. When they don’t, when a reader gets angry with something I’ve written, it’s usually for one of two reasons – either they disagree violently with what I’m saying, or they’ve missed the point. If they’ve missed the point, then that’s a great shame and I do attempt now and then, on the site or in responses to e-mails and on convention panels, to explain what I think they’ve missed, in other words to try and re-open the line of communication. But if the anger comes from a disagreement over what I’m saying, then there’s not much you can do.


what is the nicest thing a reader told you about a book you wrote? what is the worst (if any bad was said)?

One reader told me that the positive ending of Woken Furies had inspired him to fight off a long term illness he’d been suffering from – and that really moved me. Someone else told me the Kovacs books were helping him get through his divorce (which, to be honest, I found a bit alarming!) Also, I had a huge number of readers contacting me after Market Forces telling me how much the book spoke to their own nightmarish working lives inside corporate America – nice to know I hit the nail on the head there – though again I was a bit alarmed by the one who asked if I really believed that Chris Faulkner’s brutally nihilistic violence was the only option I saw for someone in that situation. Eeeek. No. Put the shotgun down…..slowly….and let’s talk this through…..

As to the worst, well, check out Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk – there are plenty of them! Market Forces and Black Man in particular came in for some heavy insults, largely I think because of the politics. But to be honest with you, the thing that hurts an author most is not a furious negative review – that just means you’ve succeeded, you’ve managed to get an emotional response out of that guy. No, the worst review you can have is the shrug, the “Meh….’s alright…” Because that means you’ve failed. The opposite of love isn’t hate – it’s indifference.


When and where do you write? night/day? home/holidays? drinking/smoking?

I’m incredibly disorganized, unfortunately. I tend to write whenever I feel the urge, whatever time of day or night that happens to be, or when a deadline is approaching and I really have to get the work done. The truth is I tend to work better under stress than not. You’d think at my age I would have developed a more mature approach to this, but, uhm, no….forty two years old and still doing my homework last thing on the bus into school…………


Have you got personal “counselors” (friends, wife, whoever) to whom you submit your chapters to taste reactions before getting ahead in a story or do you first get straight to the end before letting sbdy read the story?

I certainly don’t mind people reading my stuff while I’m producing it, I’m not a prima donna about that kind of thing. My wife sometimes reads over my shoulder – but she’s not really into SF or fantasy, so that doesn’t happen very often. And I’ll occasionally let a friend or industry acquaintance have a look at a couple of chapters if they’re interested and I happen to have the stuff to hand. But to be brutally honest, I’m rarely interested in what anyone else thinks about the work until it’s done. If they like it, that’s nice; if they don’t, too bad. You have to have a sense of your own vision when you write a novel, and while it doesn’t hurt to hear other opinions, you can’t afford to keep chopping and changing to please other people. I usually have a pretty good idea of where I’m going (in terms of themes and subject matter if not actual plot) and it’s not a path anyone else can walk for you.


Is it more important to finish a story or to publish it? I mean, which is the most emotional part?

First time around, it’s publication – no question. Nothing can match the thrill of getting published for the first time. It’s like losing your virginity under the very best of sexual circumstances. But after that first time, I’d say it’s the completion of the work that counts more. When you type the last words and know it’s done, you’ve said what you wanted to say – that’s a very powerful feeling indeed.


Did you ever write a novel and decide not to publish it?

No – well, in fact yes, sort of; my first ever completed novel, Ethics on the Precipice, written back in 1988-9, now no longer exists. It was just too embarrassing to look at, so I destroyed it. But to be honest I don’t think my editor would have been happy to publish it either – it really wasn’t very good. As to writing something acceptable to my publisher and holding it back – no, I wouldn’t do that. I don’t have that kind of money, or that much free time to waste!


What would you say to someone whose dream is to become a sf writer?

Prepare yourself for a long, hard and lonely road. Make sure this is really what you want. If you’re hoping for money or fame, forget it. Your chances of making a lot of money from novel writing are next to zero – you’d be better getting a job in banking or broking. And if it’s fame, well, you’ll get more of that just from showing your tits (or whatever) on national TV. The truth is that I have been incredibly lucky – 80% of writers never get to give up their day-job, and even those who do can find themselves struggling to make a decent living from their books. This is doubly the case in genre. Robert Sheckley, one of the finest imaginers of Golden Age SF, died a pauper, desperate for charity to pay his hospital bills. That’s an extreme case, of course, but so is the story of my success. The truth lies somewhere in between.

But if you can accept all that, and still want to write SF – then I wish you the very best of luck; and you’re going to need it.

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Per visualizzare la versione in italiano cliccare il link di seguito / For the Italian translation go to:

http://raccontifantascienzaedintorni.blogspot.com/2008/08/richard-k-morgan-parla-ai-suoi-fan.html