| A Conversation With Jack Williamson | |||||
| An interview with Jayme Lynn Blaschke | |||||
| January 1999 | |||||
|
Silicon Dagger is your 52nd novel. The book's themes -- right-wing extremists and militia movements -- are something of a departure for you. This is not the type of book you've become known for.
Yes, it's less science fictional, because it's closer to the present time, and present-day problems.
I voted Libertarian in the last couple of elections just as a sort of protest vote, because I wasn't very happy
with the Republicans and the Democrats and Ross Perot. The idea was really touched off by the Oklahoma City
bombing, Ruby Ridge and Waco, the Texas independence movement. It so concerned me about the future stability of
the country. In the story, a group of malcontents in a Kentucky county declare their independence and defend
it. Then their goal is to set up sort of an island of refuge for democracy and freedom and culture in a world
that looks about to break up.
Well, I can sympathize with the desire for freedom and independence and freedom from excessive government regulation.
On the other hand, our survival depends on an organized, functioning social system, and most of them have programs that would
break it up. I'm a spectator rather than a participant.
That process to me is fascinating and rather alarming. I can see the need for an island of refuge. The idea is not entirely new.
Many years a go I wrote a Startling Stories novel called The Fortress of Utopia that has much the same
theme. Not a very
good novel, I'm afraid. It's never been reprinted, but the idea appeals to me.
This one is closer to reality. That one was set in the future, and hastily written for half a cent a word without any
real inspiration. I was trying to make a living as a pulp writer and writing anything I could sell, even for half a cent.
Well, my theory in the novel is that all this is a result of the information revolution. In fact, the title briefly
means that information technology is a silicon dagger, (threatening) the survival of all the old authorities. There's an
element of truth there. Copy machines and computers, radio and TV and such media inform populations under
dictatorships, and spread discontent and awareness of something better. They undermine the social propaganda
machines. It's a complicated idea, and I don't understand all the ramifications of it. Nobody does. It's hard to
know where we're headed, but we're going somewhere.
I was a fascinated reader of Gibson's Neuromancer, and I used to be a fascinated reader of
The Black Mask mystery stories of the late 20s and early 30s by Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler. What
Gibson did was to translate these into a modern setting. They both feature lone wolf heroes in conflict with corrupt
authority. In those early novels the hero was a white knight, but Gibson's are all victims of the information revolution,
of change, of sophisticated technological progress controlled by big capital groups, corporations and so forth.
They're motivated by greed more than anything else. And of course, Chandler was a stylist, and Gibson is a stylist I admire.
Gibson just jumped the genre into the future, more on the basis of intuition, I think, than on any sociological
speculation. I think he wrote the book on a typewriter and not on a computer.
I don't keep up with them well at all. I taught Gibson's three cyberpunk novels with great admiration, but
when I'm working on a story of my own, it's difficult to get involved with anybody else's. Another novel I
taught and enjoyed was Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. I think that's really magnificent.
Yes, at Eastern New Mexico University. I was on the regular faculty there for close to 20 years. I retired
in 77 officially, but I've been teaching a course with a friend, Dr. Patrice Caldwell -- team teaching it -- every spring for about 10 years, alternating between creative writing and science
fiction, which I still enjoy.
H.G. Wells is the writer I feel shaped modern science fiction. He had studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley,
who was Darwin's chief spokesman. That gave him -- he understood evolution, which gave him a handle on change and the future.
Which was something new to the field and an essential part of science fiction. In science fiction, we explore the impacts
of technological change. If you look at The Time Machine, most of Wells' work, in fact, that's what he was
doing, looking at history in terms of evolutionary change. He wrote a little book called
The Discovery of the Future that was the beginning of futurology. He did his best writing, however, before
he got too much interested in intellectual approaches to it. The Sleeper Wakes has too much serious extrapolation
to be a good novel.
The earlier novels, where his imagination went freely, are his really great works. Later, I was influenced by John Campbell.
Heinlein was a good friend of mine, a man I admired greatly.
He's the Great American science fiction writer. When I got into the field, you could still read everything that everybody
wrote, and you knew the majority of people who were writing. Nowadays, so many writers are doing fine work for legions
of readers, that it's impossible to keep up with them all.
I've been more concerned with the disadvantages! I've always been in competition with younger, brighter,
better-educated people, and scrambling to keep up. On the other hand, I've been fascinated with science, the
revelation of the universe -- the large universe and the small universe, the evolution of life and it's possible
future. So there's always a new realm of speculation beyond what we know, or think we know.
I attempt to keep up as best I can. Nobody can really be a Renaissance Man anymore, but I wish I were. And there are
new, able writers coming on the field all the time. I read book reviews and look at books and now and then read
one, but not very many of them.
I'm not sure. There was always a lot to learn. To me, it's a sort of a mystery story. The universe, as we
see it, is a great riddle we'd like to understand. Every issue of Science or
Scientific American or Science News or Astronomy or whatever is just
another chapter of the story. I'm fascinated to read it. So it is recreation, what I love to do, to keep up
as best I can with what we know about it, and what we can anticipate. It's an exciting time to be alive. I
wish I could live another century.
Good science fiction is the result of... let's say a strong personal reaction to what's happening. If it's a
good story, it'll have character values and thematic interest and narrative drive that will be there after the
science changes. Too, cosmology and many other sciences are becoming too recondite for the average reader
to understand. Science has become indistinguishable from magic in the popular mind. Actually, the science
background and relevance to truth is just a bridge into the story, or a springboard. Once you get it going,
what matters are the characters, the plot, the philosophy behind the theme, the characters as reacting human
beings. So, if the story's valid to human nature, it doesn't really matter all that much in the long run if
the science is out-dated.
I loved the steady-state universe. It had no limits -- no beginning, no end. You didn't have to worry about
origins. I loved the idea of continuous creation, the reefs of space and possible biological evolution. It was
great fun to do. We had the organ bank, organ transplants. I started working on the original novel in the early
40s. I wrote a draft myself before Fred got to work on it. We did beat Dr. Christian Bernard by about four years
for the first heart transplant, but I was worried for a while we were going to be outrun by science. The books have
sold a lot of copies since we've had to give up the steady-state universe, so that didn't kill the value of it. Even
now, I'd be glad if somebody came up with an alternative explanation to the Big Bang, though it seems to be on firmer
ground every day.
I hope I'm a better writer. I know more tricks of the trade. I know more science. But the wonderful thing about
science fiction has always been that there were no taboos. You could say anything you wanted to say, so long as
you embodied it in an entertaining story. Or perhaps that may not be strictly true. I heard Heinlein say once
that Campbell didn't want him to do mature sexual relationships, though when you look at Heinlein's later work,
you may wonder what is a mature sexual relationship.
I've never been much of a revolutionary. I've very seldom wanted to break any taboos. I've just felt total
freedom to say anything I wanted.
To me, I guess the greatest reward is the satisfaction of creating. Shaping a story and getting it on paper
in the form it ought to have. I've never written bestsellers or made a great deal of money at it, but when I
look back, I've been able to spend most of my life doing something I enjoyed. When I look at people around me,
many of them are working at dollar jobs, at jobs they hate, jobs that bore them. For me it's been largely
rewarding. Of course, writing is hard work, sitting at the typewriter or computer and pounding the keys. For
many years as a pulp writer trying desperately to make a living, I worked on stories that were ill-conceived
or failed to say something I wanted to say and came to no good end. In recent years I've had more freedom to
write only what I wanted to write. A story doesn't work unless it's something you really believe. The reader
won't believe it if you don't; won't be interested if you're not interested. My files are full of abandoned
ideas, unfinished stories that didn't work out, because I didn't really care, didn't know enough about the
background, or the characters, or what I wanted to say.
I've had stories published that really shouldn't have been published, certainly. Back in those hard times, I
wanted to write for the horror magazines, which were new and paying good rates. I wrote
The Mark of the Monster, which was too heavily influenced by H.P. Lovecraft. It was rejected by the
horror magazines. I sent it to Weird Tales. They accepted it and published it with a cover
picture. The readers panned it heavily. I wish that it had never seen the light of day.
In these latter days, I don't have a great deal of strength.
If my blood pressure's low, I'll have a nap after breakfast.
I'll work for an hour or so, check the mail, work until lunch time, have a nap, and work for a while in the
afternoon. Then maybe I'll take a walk and have another spell of work if I'm able, but it only comes to
three or four hours a day of actual working. But I solve story problems while I'm away from the
machines. When the story's really working, you can be living it 24 hours a day almost.
Astronomy more than anything else. I've always tried to keep up with theory and space exploration. I got
to attend the reports from Voyager at NASA, which was a fascinating exercise.
I learned about the Oort Cloud and wrote a couple of novels set there. My wife and I used to travel every
summer while I was teaching.
I've been to all the continents, if I can include a flight over the Antarctic Circle from Argentina. The most
exciting places I've visited are China and Russia. I've been to each one of them three times. The cultures,
the museums, the history, the people are exciting to see. It was almost a science fictional exploration of a
different culture. I've seen a lot of Europe and Egypt, the Near East. I've been to India. I'd like to travel
more, but the years are catching up with me.
I thought I wanted to be a scientist when I started college.
I majored in chemistry and took a couple of years of physics and math. I was offered a student assistantship in
chemistry. So if I'd stayed, I might have been a chemist. But by then I was paying for my college experience with
my writing. I'd have had to find some other way of financing my education. I'd grown up on a farm and ranch,
and the one thing I was sure of was that I didn't want to be a rancher or a farmer.
It was a very small operation. My dad homesteaded in Eastern New Mexico in 1916 after the good land had been claimed.
We were living below the poverty line, struggling for survival.
I'm glad I didn't become a farmer or rancher.
Some years it didn't rain. The soil we were trying to farm was sandy. Sand storms would blow the sand enough to
cover up a young crop. Farm prices were low. In 1918, when I was 10 years old, it didn't rain. My dad had a few
cattle, and we drove them around eastern New Mexico and into Texas looking for grass for them. I went along and
drove the chuck wagon. I remember at the end of summer we shipped them to Kansas City. My dad went along and I
remember waving him good-bye and wondering if I would ever see him again. He sold the cattle and sent the money
back to the bank. He worked in the harvest to make money for railway fare to Arizona. He worked there in a copper
mine to make money to keep the family alive. That was how we survived.
Yes, agriculture has become a high-tech activity itself. My brother's still at it. Our original homestead is now
part of a larger ranch. He's an expert on genetics and animal feeding, artificial insemination and ranch management.
I'm not sure I'll be remembered at all. I pioneered some of the science fictional themes such as anti-matter. I
invented the term "terraforming," which seems to have gotten into the language -- at least into the dictionary. I
was the first person to use the term "genetic engineering" so far as Webster's Collegiate Dictionary knows. I
sent them tear sheets from Dragon's Island, and they agreed to date the first use back to 1951. Of course, in
100 years I don't know what will be remembered.
Well, I've written a Mars novel, Beachhead, but when you consider all the parts of the Earth that
might be terraformed, it seems like a long haul to Mars. A lot of New Mexico could stand some weather
modification. We human beings are part of a very complicated biological system that we don't entirely understand.
I'm not sure how successfully all of it can be translated to other environments, so I'm not as enthusiastic about
terraforming as I was in 1942.
(This interview first appeared in the January 1999 issue of Interzone.)
Jayme Lynn Blaschke graduated from Texas A&M University with a degree in journalism. He writes science fiction and fantasy short fiction and has several in-progress novels lying around in various stages of decay. His non-fiction articles and interviews have seen publication in the U.S., Britain and Australia. His website can be found at www.exoticdeer.org/jayme.html |
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