The First William P. McGivern Science Fiction Megapack
The Second William P. McGivern Science Fiction Megapack
The A. Merritt Megapack*
The Talbot Mundy Megapack
The E. Nesbit Megapack
The Andre Norton Megapack
The H. Beam Piper Megapack
The Mack Reynolds Megapack
The Rafael Sabatini Megapack
The Saki Megapack
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack
The Robert Sheckley Megapack
The Bram Stoker Megapack
The Lon Williams Weird Western Megapack
The Virginia Woolf Megapack
The William Hope Hodgson Megapack
* Not available in the United States
** Not available in the European Union
***Out of print.
OTHER COLLECTIONS YOU MAY ENJOY
The Great Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany (it should have been called “The Lord Dunsany Megapack”)
The Wildside Book of Fantasy
The Wildside Book of Science Fiction
Yondering: The First Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
To the Stars—And Beyond! The Second Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Once Upon a Future: The Third Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Whodunit?—The First Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
More Whodunits—The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries
INTERVIEW: DAN SIMMONS, conducted by Darrell Schweitzer
Question: You seem to have come out of nowhere in the past couple of years. Is that actually so, or are you one of those cases where ten years of hard work made you an overnight success?
Simmons: I’d like to say I’m one of those classic overnight successes that takes a decade, but it’s been somewhere in between. I’ve been writing professionally for eight years now, and in the last year or two things have begun to come to a critical mass.
Q: Weren’t you a Twilight Zone contest-winner and discovery?
Simmons: I was the co-winner of the 1982 Twilight Zone annual contest—the first big one they had. It was an exercise in finding perspective because the day that my first piece of fiction was published in Twilight Zone, our daughter Jane was born. So nobody noticed that I was a published writer for six months.
Q: But they noticed as soon as Song of Kali came out. Could you tell us something about the background of that book? How much of it did you experience personally?
Simmons: Oddly enough, a lot of things in Song of Kali are true. In fact, many of them I either witnessed personally or heard about second-hand. But the terrible stuff didn’t happen to me. It was rather arrogant of me to write about Calcutta, or India. I spent nine weeks wandering through India in the summer of 1977 on a Fulbright Fellowship with some other educators from the United States. During that time I think I spent a total of two and a half days in Calcutta. One of the nice things about it was that my agenda in Calcutta included attended the Calcutta Writers’ workshop, which was run by a poet named P. Lal, who is quite famous on the Subcontinent. He was a protege of Tagore—who was the great poet, artist, film-maker of India. So in that sense the book includes some reportage, just some of the details of meeting P. Lal in this ancient, rotting hotel in the rotting center of the city, the electricity going out and the conversation going on unabated in pitch darkness. There was no light whatsoever. All you could hear was the scurry of rats in the darkness. It was about a hundred and five degrees in this ballroom, and the writers and intellectuals there continued chatting until some waiter brought a candle, and then the conversation continued by candlelight. So little touches like that gave me the atmosphere. At first I didn’t consider writing a story or novel set completely in India, but after a few years passed and I had already structured an article for Harper’s, I said, “Why not a book?”
Q: Have you any idea how the Indians reacted? Have they seen it?
Simmons: You mean other than the class-action suit from the city of Calcutta chamber of commerce? I’ve spoken to just a few Indian nationals about the book. I did have one opportunity at a college where I was going to speak. There was a reception committee of several Indian students who were ready for a debate. But the confrontation didn’t occur and I have no idea what I would have debated since obviously I did libel and slander the city of Calcutta. Several Bengalis who have spoken to me since have said that the book was strangely accurate. Not all of them have lived in Calcutta, but they confirm that certain details about the Beggars’ Union and the like were accurate, which must be luck after my having spent just nine weeks in India.
Q: You managed to make it a fairly scary place. Then again, people from Calcutta would probably think that way about New York.
Simmons: I think that way about New York too.
Q: Are you going to write more about India, or quit while you’re ahead?
Simmons: Definitely quit while I’m ahead. I really don’t have anymore to say about India. Actually, I have two books in Indian settings. One of my favorite books (of my own) is Phases of Gravity, about an ex-Apollo astronaut who goes on sort of an epistemological quest to find out the truth about himself and the universe, and it starts in India. Some people have suggested, “Oh, you’re following up Song of Kali with something else about India.” But this first section in Phases of Gravity was set in India because I had started book before I began Song of Kali, and then set Phases of Gravity aside for several years. Otherwise I would not have repeated the Indian setting.
Q: I saw one suitably scary thing about Calcutta in the paper recently, which I’m sure someone is going to write a book about. Have you heard about the “Stone Man”? He is a serial killer stalking the streets of Calcutta, and he carries fifty-pound slabs of concrete around and drops them on the heads of people sleeping on the sidewalks late at night. To me the image and the name The Stone Man somehow resonate. There’s a book there for someone.
Simmons: I think someone should write it, but perhaps set it in New York. It’s interesting because I just went back to New York last week after several years of being away. My reaction was, “My God, it’s turned into Calcutta,” just with the number of people sleeping in Grand Central and in the street. There always were a few, but what strikes one in India is the tens of thousands who live on the streets, and the idea of someone like the Stone Man is just so horrifying. In many of my snapshots—mental and Kodak—of the city of Calcutta there was a baby sleeping in a crack in the sidewalk with people stepping over it on their way to work. So somebody walking around with a fifty pound of stone, dropping it on sleeping people, would be comparable to someone who has total access, somebody capable of moving through the fourth, fifth dimensions into our children’s bedrooms here. It’s a horrifying thought. But if someone does it as fiction, though, I think he or she should move it to New York.
Q: To most Americans New York is sufficiently horrifying that it would just seem natural.... But anyway, after India, you rapidly got off the planet. Obviously you didn’t spend nine weeks wandering through Hyperion. How did the novel Hyperion begin, and how did the creation of an imaginary setting differ for you from describing some place you’ve actually been.
Simmons: It was more of a challenge than I expected, and I expected a challenge. The two Hyperion books, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, came out of an easy promise to write two science-fiction novels for Bantam/Doubleday, and part of the deal was that they would publish my Phases of Gravity, which is, as I say, a favorite child of mine. I liked the name Hyperion, so rather off-handedly I decided to co-opt Keats’s unfinished poems, which was absurd, because his themes are so important. I knew the poems casually when I decided to write about them, and by the time I finished the second book (which is rather large—the two volumes together are almost a thousand printed pages, about the size of Carrion Comfort), I felt a tremendous affinity and affection
for John Keats. I hadn’t expected that. So this is my attempt to respond to some of the powerful themes that Keats began and left unfinished, which sounds presumptuous, but his poetic fantasy world was no less an exercise in hubris than my creating the science-fiction universe that I shared in Hyperion.
Q: One of the things that most impressed me about the book, rather than its sheer intensity, was the way that each segment became a masterful version of a specific type of science-fiction story, the one about the priest being a Philip José Farmer story, the detective’s tale being cyberpunk, and so on. But somehow it coalesced into a unified whole rather than becoming a bundle of in-jokes. So, how much of this was a deliberate attempt to address various set modes of SF?
Simmons: Rather than a conscious, premeditated decision to touch all the bases in science fiction, I think it was an enjoyable subconscious choice. The different voices had to be there, because it was a Canterbury Tales type of story. Those voices have been in the types of science fiction I’ve enjoyed so much, and so, rather than a calculated, premeditated, and outlined choice, a different voice simply began speaking as I came to each section. Actually, it was a bit of a celebration. I don’t know if I’ll come back to science fiction, so in these two Hyperion books, especially the first one with its possibility of the different voices, I had fun celebrating things like the energy of cyberpunk, the scope of Asimov, and the sense of “other-whereness” one finds in Wolfe and Vance. Why not? I figured I might only pass this way once.
Q: The one standard type that I found missing from Hyperion is what you might called the Left Hand of Darkness voice, the somewhat detached anthropologically-inclined outsider’s observation. Is there any of that in the second book?
Simmons: There may be a certain element. The narrator of the second book is a cybrid—which is the human, mobile unit of a huge, artificial intelligence—and he shows a little of the historical, archaeological, learned perspective you’re talking about, but I think that voice—the Left Hand of Darkness, elegant SF voice—is quite powerful, and I tend to reserve it. If I come back to science fiction, it might be in a future novel.
Q: So far, in the space of two books, you seem to have absorbed and stood above all science fiction that’s gone before. So if you came back to it again, what would follow?
Simmons: A variety of things could follow. The Hyperion books were my cosmic scale books ... the ones that dealt with the macroverse. If I came back to science fiction, I think I would choose a focus that would be tighter and terribly intense. There is a novel I’d like to write called The Hollow Man, about a telepath, and there you’re moving into the region of Silverberg and Dying Inside and Le Guin and my own Phases of Gravity, and just a different voice and tone entirely, a rather introspective, personal tale that deals with our interior universe. So that could be my next foray into science fiction. Obviously that doesn’t allow the chance the Hyperion book did just to gallop rough-shod right through the field, which I enjoyed doing. And I hope it was a respectful rough-shod gallop, because the intent certainly was.
Q: I’m hoping it’ll be this year’s Hugo winner. I think if it gets enough exposure, either a book club edition or mass-market paperback in time, it has an excellent chance. But, what I notice about all your books so far is that they’ve been sharply different. Are you still going to be able to keep this up indefinitely, or will the publishers at some point say, “Well, Hyperion did so well that we want more books like that”?
Simmons: You know publishers. Song of Kali was not a commercial success by any means, but it won the World Fantasy Award in 1986, so they immediately said, “Please, keep this tone, this voice, this genre, and preferably write about India again.” To which I said, “No.” My goal is not necessarily to make everything different. It’s just that so far all the books have been different. Sometimes I do reflect that the one joy of being unpublished is that you can write what you damn well please. I’m trying to maintain some of that freedom. I think the important thing is not which genre you write in and not the subject-matter of each book, but that there be an identifiable voice that the readers trust. I think that makes all the difference, and it will determine whether or not any writer finds a readership.
Q: Having done two horror novels, Phases of Gravity, and then some science fiction, if you do not pass this way again, what next? What are you writing now?
Simmons: Currently I’m working on a horror novel, which is not quite a horror novel, for Putnam’s. I have a two-book contract with Putnam’s. This first one, titled Summer of Night, takes me to what I consider to be Ray Bradbury country. It’s about children but none of the topics are childish topics. It’s about the innocence of our country and ourselves when a lot of us in the Baby-Boom generation were just approaching the end of innocence—which all sounds terribly clichéd, so obviously this is a minefield of a book. But it does reassure me that what I’m writing about, while not all overtly supernatural, does scare me. Very little of the fiction I’ve read recently is frightening, but some of what I’m writing about is does scare me. It could be just intensely personal, just scaring me, but I think that perhaps other people will find it a little unnerving too. Part of our childhood and national past got scary very quickly back around 1960.
Q: Do you have any theories on why one writes about scary things? It’s possible to write a book that would be so frightening that no one could read it. On the other hand, I have a suspicion that people are drawn to bad horror films precisely because they’re not convincing. Obviously you can’t do it that way. A book is expected to be convincing. So, why are we reading about intensely unpleasant things? Audiences have always been drawn to this sort of thing ever since there have been stories, but you wouldn’t want to live through, say, the events in the average Shakespeare play. But we’re attracted.
Simmons: I think a lot of people are not drawn to unpleasant things. That’s why they rule out a lot of literary horror along with slasher films that are simply unpleasant. Many sensitive adults don’t need or want the blend of biological and psychological unpleasantness which horror offers. That’s all there is to it. And you’re right, the adolescents who watch and wallow in some of the more slasher-type stories and novels—well, both the fiction and its audience are shallow and predictable, and they reduce a real fear to nonsense. That’s not the kind of written horror that I have much interest in. I like fiction and films which present something that is unsettling but honest and put into a perspective where one can make some sense out of it. I think that is what is often lacking in horror fiction. After the unsettling, what? One would like to see some perspective, some explanation, some sense that not only is it a shared experience of an unsettling feeling or something that is rather terrifying, but also be offered some way to deal with it, some way that’s at least an account of how some other person dealt with it, rather than simply a record of despair or of being overcome or being sacrificed to this fear, whatever it is. That’s what I think is lacking in a lot of horror fiction, a point where not only do the victims realize they are victims, but where they decide to cease being victims and to stand up to whatever it is. I don’t mean by going down in the dungeon and slaughtering the monster, but simply to see it, to put it in perspective, and to wrestle with it to the best of one’s limited human abilities.
Q: At least to face it with some dignity.
Simmons: Exactly.
Q: What if it is something like the Lovecraftian view of things, where what you’re facing is the chaotic universe itself? He, for instance, was not optimistic about our ability to cope.
Simmons: Well, here at the World Fantasy Convention I heard someone say something like that on a panel; that one definition of dark fantasy was simply trying to stand up to this huge wind from nowhere that you can’t stand up against. I’m familiar with the Lovecraftian view. I don’t share it. One of the trends in my fiction is that no matter how huge and powerful this force is from the other place, human beings have to stand up to it. It’s simply part of the contra
ct we have with life; we have to deal with it. Instead of having the Lovecraftian force coming through some inter-dimensional portal and just overwhelming the humans, I’ve got cancer vampires oozing through the wall, and we human beings in a hospital ward trying our damndest to deal with them before they lay their tumor eggs in our loved ones. So that’s my response to Lovecraftian fiction.
Q: I suppose an existentialist would try to plug in morality to give some meaning to life. Lovecraft did it with aesthetics. There is some validity in that, for all he thought that if a man went to another planet, he’d go quite mad. But that’s just one more voice in horror fiction. Your fiction, in any case, has so many voices already. How do you maintain a distinctive voice of your own amid so many others?
Simmons: Well, first I establish my own voice. If my first novel had been Hyperion, I think there would have been a lot of legitimate concern from readers, certainly from critics, “Does this man have a voice?” But I feel fairly confident that, having written and published several novels before Hyperion, the voice is there. And, under the SF subject matter and certain superficial tonal qualities in Hyperion, you’ll certainly hear the Simmons voice. That’s my feeling. And because Hyperion is a tale told in two volumes, with the second volume being one unified narrative voice I don’t have very much concern about being lost in the Chaucerian babel of the first volume.
Q: In which direction would you like to go after the horror novels?
Simmons: Well, I should know better than to talk about future projects, but I do have one project that I am very much looking forward to. That’s a novel that I’ve titled The Crook Factory, set in 1941-42, during Ernest Hemingway’s lost year in Cuba, when he refused to go off to become a war correspondent even while his wife Martha Gellhorn was sending back wonderful dispatches from the front and urging him to join her. Instead he was sitting there in Cuba playing spy with a rag-tag counter-espionage group he had put together called The Crook Factory. It consisted of bullfighters, veterans of the Spanish Civil War, bartenders, rum-runners, gun-runners, and the crooks and lost souls of Havana. Over the last few years I’ve been amassing more information about this and both the plot and the complicated, contradictory character of Hemingway get more and more interesting. As I say, it’s silly to talk about a project, but I’ve staked this out, so this story, by God, will be mine. That’s my dream project.
The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack Page 2
