The Reality Break Interviews: Volume #0

by Dave Slusher

JM: It's all sort of consciously schematic. I tried to make the characters real and have their own little existential quirks, but the big idea I'm playing with is sort of like the old Hindu story called The Blind Man and the Elephant. A bunch of blind men approach the same elephant and they each touch a different part of the elephant's anatomy. They reach different conclusions about what type of beast an elephant is. One will grab the tail is very much like a snake, and someone will touch the trunk and decide that the elephant is like a rope, and someone will touch its side and say that the elephant is like a wall, and somebody runs into the tusk and decides that the elephant is like a spear. I do the same thing with the body of God. When the believers encounter it they are scandalized and depressed and terrified. Most of the crewmen have conventional Judeo-Christian beliefs and then I contrive to put a feminist on board and for her this corpse is really bad news because it seems to validate the whole patriarchal religious interpretation of reality, that God is male and is sort of a fearsome bearded figure whom one must obey before anything else. Some atheists get wind of the tragedy and they filter it through their viewpoint. If you think about it, the death of God is every bit as upsetting to atheists as it would be for believers because it invalidates their viewpoint as well. If God once did exist then atheism is not a sensible interpretation of reality either. Everybody interprets the corpse through their own ideology and it's like a Rorschach test. It was fun, as often happens with sea sagas, to have lots of different people on the ship with very diverse backgrounds and competing arguments about how the universe works.

  DS: How long have you been writing, and how long have you been writing science fiction? Did they happen at the same time?

  JM: That's a good question. I suppose there are a couple of different ways to answer it. In a sense, I've been writing my whole verbal life. I've got a story I wrote at age seven. It's divided into chapters, so maybe I should call it a novella. When I was six and seven I would make up stories in my head and I would pace around the dining room, dictating the stories to my mother who would dutifully transcribe them with her old manual typewriter. This was in the years before word processors. It was called “The story of the Dog Family” and had these talking dogs in it. Each chapter was maybe three sentences long, but I loved the idea of dividing a story into chapters. I though that was great. Since it was talking dogs, I suppose it would be considered science fiction. I never developed the addiction to science fiction literature that a lot of kids do as they grow up. I was a great movie fan and I loved narrative in general and read most of the children's classics, but had no special for SF. I would read the stuff most kids run across like The Time Machine and War of the Worlds. I came to the field late. I taught for many years, and I assumed that my career would be in education. I got burned out at that, and found myself in possession of an idea for a novel that was set on another planet. I said to myself “Well, this must be science fiction. I guess I am destined to write about the impossible or the improbable, after all.” [laughs] I think in some ways it was good that I didn't consciously prepare myself for such a career and steep myself only in the literature of science fiction has given me a bit of perspective. I come at it more out of a desperate desire to get certain themes and ideas across than out of any wish to just participate in the culture of SF. To this day, I confess I don't read very much of it. Most of what I read is mainstream. I certainly respect the good works that have been done by many of my colleagues, but I only wrote the novel because I had something I really wanted to say. Violence was the theme, is violence a necessary part of the human character? I was fascinated with that philosophical question. I probably came to it more as an educator and someone who was interested in psychology in his first career as a teacher, than as someone with any particular love of SF.

  DS: A major theme of your work is theological—in this novel, and in Only Begotten Daughter and your “Bible Stories for Adults” series of short works. Do you have any formal theological training or is this just a theme that concerns you very much?

  JM: No, almost the opposite. I had very little by way of a religious upbringing. Maybe I'm trying to compensate for that by chasing God through the pages of my fiction. A lot of people are surprised to find out that I'm not an angry lapsed Catholic and that I was never assaulted by a nun with a ruler. Even though there is a lot of bitterness and irreverence in Only Begotten Daughter, I like to think of it as mostly theological speculation. I love the big questions and I love the way the transfixion enables one to play with the big questions and not be embarrassed by it. I think the mainstream long ago gave up on novels that dealt directly with philosophical riddles. It seems like most of the contemporary literature you read is about the author's ethnic heritage or divorce or something. These are interesting enough subjects but there are other things happening in the cosmos. I had a generic Presbyterian upbringing. My parents took me to Sunday School, but they had not particular convictions themselves. They had a a sort of inoculation theory of religion. I ought to get a little bit of it, because otherwise I might one day leap into a cult. [laughs] I have to say that much of religion bewilders and angers me. At one level I don't get it, and that's why I keep exploring it. It seems to me that the reality that I hear religious people describe is not reality as I experience it, and that gap fascinates me. I'm always going to be worrying about that problem. I really don't understand why people subscribe to particular creeds that for me fly in the face of what we know about the universe. Which is not to say we know a great deal, we are quite ignorant about it as Lewis Thomas would say.

  DS: Part of the nature of your work, more so in the longer work, is a very satirical outlook. You present some rather absurd situations and some rather absurd characters. Is it easy to lose control of absurdity?

  JM: I suppose there is always a danger of a premise so extreme that it is simply dismissed by the reader who says “This couldn't possibly happen, so why should I take any interest in it?” I think if you do your homework, you can bring it off. It's a matter of eventually coming to believe your own unbelievable premise. The people for whom Towing Jehovah works, take it seriously. They have to think through their own image of God and then compare it to this sort of overtly cartoonish image of God—this old man with a beard out of the Sistine Chapel painting by Michelangelo. I'm inviting the reader to do that, and I'm very serious in that invitation. Satire is deadly serious. It's not to be confused with burlesque or parody or Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy or anything for a laugh mode. It's a very angry mode, and very consistent in what it is trying to say. There is always that risk of it being unbelievable and the reader saying “I much prefer contemporary mainstream fiction and its commitment to reality, the mimetic.” If I do a lot of research and get certain technical details right, details about piloting ships and how supertankers work, I think I can win the reader over.

  DS: Of the wide variety of viewpoints and outlooks for the characters in Towing Jehovah, are there any particular that are closer to yours, or are all the viewpoints yours?

  JM: There's a little bit of me in each character. My previous novel, Only Begotten Daughter, about Jesus Christ's divine half-sister, was kind of autobiographical. Her confusion about whether God exists and what God expects of us, what we have the right to expect of God, is essentially my own confusion. In Towing Jehovah, I guess the militant agnostic humanist feminist is maybe closest in some ways to my own sympathies. Oddly, it's a female alter-ego for me. There's much of the captain and his obsession with his own failure in me. I like to torment myself, mostly at the level of my books never seeming very good to me. I'm very guilty of that. I think that my world view remains essentially skeptical, and that's embodied in Cassie Fowler. She is not part of the crew, she is rescued as a castaway. She has been on a trip that recapitulates Darwin's voyage to the Galapagos and the ship is sunk in a hurricane, and she manages to climb aboard a coral reef and send out a distress signal. That's how I got her on the ship and she causes a lot of disruption.

  DS: I di
d also notice that Cassie Fowler has worked as a playwright, and that she has written a play that sounds suspiciously like something you might have written. She wrote a “Bible Stories for Adults” play.

  JM: I give her credit for some of my short stories. [laughs] I made her into a playwright because I want her to have a foot in the humanist camp as well, but she is also a biologist. She is maybe vaguely like Robert Ardry. I should also mention the priest, Thomas Occam, has part of me in him as well. I very much respect the sort of believer who is very curious about scientific understandings of reality and gives them their due, instead of this awful problem we have now of the fundamentalist obsession with the biblical interpretation of what are really questions that I think science has a much better handle on. This idolatry vis a vis the Bible drives me absolutely nuts. Occam is based on maybe Killal de Chardin or maybe Stanley Jacqui or any number of these Catholic scientists—a fascinating breed of human being.

  DS: You also edit the Nebula Awards anthologies.

  JM: I'm just finishing up that stint. I did the last three, 26 through 28, and I had to anthologize my own novella in the last one, “City of Truth.” I don't think that's a vocation I will stick with. I didn't enjoy being an editor. You make a lot of enemies, you annoy the writers whose work you can't include in the book. I thought I'd give it a try, but it's not me. It's really a different set of skills than constructing fiction.

  DS: Was it awkward having to include your own work?

  JM: [laughs] I think it would have been if it hadn't been the winner. There have been situations where editors of Nebula anthologies have put in stories that have been runners up and what can I say? I suppose it is psychologically healthy to admire own's own work, but it raises a few eyebrows. I had no choice, Dave! The novella won the award, and so I had to anthologize it. [laughs]

  I carved out a piece of Towing Jehovah, and just recently published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. One of Cassie Fowler's plays was at one point was reproduced in toto in the manuscript, and then I realized it was throwing the pace off. I removed it from the novel—or most of it, I left a couple of pages of it—and then published it. I've been working on the sequel to Towing Jehovah, so that's been keeping me from getting much short fiction written.

  Kim Stanley Robinson Introduction

  Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the higher profile authors that I've interviewed, especially for as many times as he has been on the show. This interview is the first I did with him, between Red Mars and Green Mars. I also ended up interviewing him on both Blue Mars and Antarctica. There was something special about this first one, though. It was arranged with the help of Professor Bud Foote at Georgia Tech. Robinson was doing some guest lectures at the school, and whilst in town was doing some other publicity things, like signings. At a signing at The Science Fiction and Mystery Bookshop, Bud Foote helped negotiate a time and place to do the interview, which turned out to be in his home office. I remember that they first wanted me to do the interview in the afternoon. When I said I couldn't, because I had a day job, Robinson said with all sincerity “Oh, I'm very sorry. How terrible for you.”

  Years later, we would meet again in person at the Powell's in Beaverton, Oregon for the Antarctica tour. We were supposed to go back to my home studio and do an interview with me returning him in time to for his signing, but late flights and snafus stood in the way. Still, he was as pleasant and personable in the midst of this chaos as he was in Bud Foote's living room.

  The thing I like best about Robinson and his work is that I can see it having the same influence on the teens of today (and tomorrow) that the Isaac Asimov and Ted Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison stories I read had on me. It gives them a place to escape and to think beyond their time and place, to let their imaginations run free. I think that's a good thing, and I'm glad I got to be a part of it.

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  This interview was conducted at the home of Professor Bud Foote in Atlanta, Georgia in March, 1994.

  DS: You are in town [Atlanta] speaking to Georgia Tech students and talking about your new book Green Mars.

  KSR: That's right. Professor Bud Foote has invited me as part of the Literature, Communications and Culture program [of Georgia Tech] so I am here to talk to some classes and give a speech and do some signings at the local bookstores. It's associated with Green Mars coming out now, but it just happened to be at this time. I enjoy coming out here. The students are interesting. I'm a science groupie myself. I was not trained as a scientist but I'm married to one and I'm very interested in the whole process of science. I like to meet with students and talk with them. Also, I used to be a college teacher and I'm not anymore, so I come back to Georgia Tech to get a flashback of the good parts of teaching without having to grade papers. It's wonderful.

  DS: Mars is the current series that you are working on. When you began it, it was before the current Mars craze had hit. What do you make of that? Why do you suppose that Mars has become a hot topic recently?

  KSR: I'm kind of mystified about it, to tell you the truth. I've been asked the question before because in the last couple of years at least fifteen science fiction novels set on Mars have come out all at once. Everyone has noticed that there is this trend, but no one knows what it means. Neither do I, but it does occur to me that it was 1976 when Viking landed on Mars and gave us a gigantic amount of data. Maybe it has just taken this long for science fiction writers to process that data and figure out what it might mean, what stories you might tell about it, and actually realize the enormous potential for storytelling. I think it's just a coincidence partly, and that it takes that long to process the fact of the new world, which is more or less what we have been given by the Viking and Mariner missions.

  DS: Before beginning Red Mars, you've written about Mars a few times, in “Green Mars", originally a short story and the like. What interests you personally in writing about Mars as a subject?

  KSR: The thing that first drew me to it in these early stories was the landscapes that I saw on the photographs that were sent back by Mariner and Viking. A lot of the Viking photos were taken stereo optically, by two cameras or by one camera in two different positions, so that you could look through a viewer and get a sense of it in three dimensions. I saw some tremendous landscapes. Incredibly tall cliffs, giant volcanoes, enormous canyons as long as the United States is wide.

  I'm a backpacker. I really love the time I spend in the high mountains and in the deserts of the American West. It occurred to me from the first look at these photographs that what we had here was an entire world made up of mountains and deserts of the kind that I really enjoy. I like bare rock. So I got interested in Mars at first just because of the potential for backpacking—which is silly, but that's how these things come about. The more I began to think about it the more I began to think that this process of terraforming, of transforming Mars’ atmosphere and giving it a biosphere is simply an astonishing idea and it is a new idea in history.

  Until 1976 we didn't know enough about Mars to know whether it was possible or not. If Mars had turned out to be as dry as the moon, there wouldn't have been enough water to make a biosphere, and that would have scotched the plan right from the start. Now we know that there is a lot of water on Mars in permafrost form, and it's possible to terraform it. That is a physical possibility, not theoretical. Between the combination of what we know about it and what we know about our own technology, we can do the equations. The times involve vary, depending on how optimistic the scientists are about the technology involved. The shortest estimate I've ever seen has been 50 years but that is kind of an extremist judgement. More typically it would be somewhere between a few thousand years and about 20,000 years. Some at the long end of the scale talk about 100,000 years which is awfully long. If you are only talking about 1000 years then it is within the scale of possibility because we would be seeing progress all a long the way. Terraforming is a real possibility. There is only one biosphere that we know of, Earth, and ther
e are probably millions of Earths throughout the universe but we can't get to any of them. Mars is basically right next door. It is possible that we could introduce a biosphere there that would then begin to self organize and become its own place and that's simply a tremendously exciting possibility to me.

  DS: Your book Red Mars is concerned with the ethical conflicts of terraforming, the responsibility that you have to leave as it was versus the pragmatic need to have the planet terraformed. Is part of this superimposing our environmental concerns of today onto Mars of the future?

  KSR: Yes, exactly. I think it is a nice way of thinking about our own environmental movement and figuring out what it is about our environment that we really value. People talk about the land ethic when they talk about environmentalism. The phrase comes from Aldo Leopold and the notion that what is good for humanity is what is good for the land . People who would advocate the terraforming of Mars would say that when he says the land he doesn't mean the rock, he means the bacteria and the life forms at all scales that exist bonded into the land and on top of the land. What he means by the land is the biosphere. I'm not so sure that's what Aldo Leopold meant. I think he may have included rock amongst the things that we need to grant intrinsic worth and to take care of, but in any case it makes you think about what it is in nature that we love. Is it the simple fact of geology and rock or is it life itself that we are talking about?

  In Mars you get to think about these issues explicitly because the Mars that's already there is obviously a beautiful place and it has its own intrinsic worth. It is a spectacular, awesome place. Terraforming it would wreck some features. Introduction of water would immediately begin to tear apart a very arid surface, and chemical reactions that had never happened before would happen instantly. The soil would practically boil. It would change Mars dramatically. If people were committed to the rock of Mars and its intrinsic worth as it is right now, they would be violently opposed to terraforming Mars. I would be violently opposed if someone came to California and said “Let's irrigate Death Valley. We can make this into a pretty place and have forests all over the American West.” Perhaps you could, but I would be very offended because I love the American desert the way it is. Certainly in that first group of Martian colonists there are going to be some humans who are going to fall in love with Mars the way it is. They will resist the process of terraformation. I have sympathy for that in a way, because of the analogy to Death Valley and the American deserts.