ince the publication of his first book, Song of Kali, a suspense novel that won a World Fantasy Award, Dan Simmons has been dodging labels like a champion pugilist ducking a sucker punch. Three diverse novels saw publication in 1989, turning it into a breakout year for Simmons: Phases of Gravity, a mainstream novel dealing with middle age and spiritual transcendence; Carrion Comfort, an epic horror novel that examined American class wars; and Hyperion, the first of a quartet of novels that mixed the poetry of John Keats with old-fashioned space opera. Eleven years later, Simmons continues to defy categorization. During an interview at his home, Simmons talked about genre versus mainstream fiction, electronic publishing and Internet piracy, and some recent and forthcoming projects.
What was the impetus for your latest novel, Darwin's Blade?
Simmons: The impetus was my interest in a person like Darwin Minor, who applies intelligence and rigid, cause-and-effect logic to a world in which stupidity and gibbering chaos seem to be in the driver's seat. The tale is a thriller and a black comedy--it moves from rather broad comedy to this mystery thriller. The major character is Darwin "Dar" Minor, a Ph.D. in physics and a former NTSB accident investigator who is now working for a private, California-based insurance investigation company. His wife and child die in an air crash, which is based on an unfortunate incident in Colorado Springs, one of four crashes the NTSB hasn't solved yet. Dar is an accident reconstruction expert with a complicated personality and past. His mind is so analytical, it is almost Holmesian in that sense.
Last year you published The Crook Factory, a mainstream thriller. Now you've got another thriller, Darwin's Blade, due out in October from Morrow. Have you given up science fiction and horror for a life of writing thrillers?
Simmons: I'm not abandoning ship. I don't see genres like different ships. I get the urge to write the next book and then somebody has to categorize it. It really hasn't been so much a career plan as a tremendous celebration of being able to write what I want. Which sounds corny, but that's true. I'm not turning into a thriller writer. However The Crook Factory and Darwin's Blade [are] marketed by their publisher, neither book meets the definition of a "thriller." That sub-genre has demands, protocols and formulae of its own (and when I plunk down my money at an airport kiosk for a thriller, I damn well expect to get a thriller!). Neither of my books qualifies, I'm afraid. The Crook Factory might be called a "a biographical literary mystery" in the sense that at the heart of it is the question, "Just who the hell was Ernest Hemingway?" But its pace and pulse are all wrong for a thriller.
I am running into the problems that my agent and everyone explained to me. Computers look at my name now, and I don't exist. So instead of buying 10 hardcovers, it might be zero, because I don't exist as a thriller writer. And many of the chain computers are compartmentalized. Refusing to be pigeonholed has affected my sales. My theory was that I could find a readership that would follow me. But most of the market research shows that of the 600,000 people who buy Carrion Comfort and the 600,000 who buy Hyperion, there's only about 11 people who cross over. So I know that I'll probably get a total of 11 in this new category. But I'm happy to be able to write. So many writers are falling by the wayside today, or they're being subsumed into the franchise machine. Which I can't do.
How do you feel about recent developments in electronic publishing and the battle over copyrights? Or Internet piracy?
Simmons: Actually, I think that the battle for copyright protection and equitable business arrangements in e-rights is just beginning to shape up, and the outlook is good for writers. For a change, a "revolutionary" step is actually ... well ... revolutionary.
Publishing has long been a quaint 19th-century business and, since they have a monopoly on making books (a monopoly that makes Microsoft look weak and innocent), everyone's had to play by publishers' arcane and often insane rules. With the advent of various forms of electronic publishing, including upcoming universal "Ethernet-style" wireless transmission to the new e-books, Rocketbooks, etc., we really are in a new ball game. Combine that with sensible print-on-demand print runs and so forth, and times they are a-changin'.
I mentioned electronic publishing and the Internet recently at the World Horror Convention town meeting (in Denver, May 2000) because one of the writers on that panel, Harlan Ellison, is currently the only writer out fighting the good fight for writers everywhere. (Much as Metallica has more or less "single-bandedly" taken on the MP3 pirating that everyone thought was the inevitable wave of the future. It isn't ... it's just theft.) Harlan, it turns out, is perhaps the only writer in America who did not rely upon publishers' so-called copyrights for short fiction, but who registered each and every work he wrote with the U.S. Copyright Office.
Because of that, he is currently suing hundreds of Internet shareware thieves who take pleasure in scanning authors' works onto the Net and disseminating them without copyright release. Harlan is spending a fortune of his own money in pursuing these lawsuits. Everyone laughs at him for attempting to stop an inevitable flood of Internet theft. Harlan is going to win each and every lawsuit. He is going to win big. He is going to drive these thieves off the Net and make them pay every bit of their weekly Blockbuster paychecks in making amends. He is going to set a precedent as real and as important as Charles Dickens in his "silly" 19th-century lawsuits and attempts at establishing international copyrights. Dickens came to America to tell American publishers and readers to quit stealing (a universal practice--no American publisher paid for British reprint rights, they just "sharewared"). Dickens told them to stop or he'd sic his solicitor on them. They laughed. Dickens used his fortunes to sic. He won. Writers were protected. Harlan Ellison is the Charles Dickens of the electronic age, and all the ignorami can do is call him "Luddite." (And they don't even know the origin of the term Luddite, or the honor that goes with that artisans' effort to preserve their jobs and families.)
Recent industry reports mentioned two SF novels that you're planning to write, Ilium and Olympos, which are based on The Iliad and The Odyessy by Homer. Can you tell us anything about them?
Simmons: Ilium and Olympos are just gleams in the eye at this point. Suffice it to say that I'm enjoying the hell out of re-reading every translation I can find of The Iliad, not to mention every critical analysis, and that I currently have no idea in the world how I'll imbed those images, themes and characters in a workable SF context. It'll work out, though. If you asked me "how" at this point, I'd have to grin stupidly like the theater owner in Shakespeare in Love and say, "I don't know--it's a mystery."
Your short story "Orphans of the Helix" won a Locus Award this year. You mentioned two other SF stories that you recently finished. Care to talk about them?
Simmons: "Orphans of the Helix" [published in Far Horizons] looks at different themes than any of the Hyperion novels: change, and what amounts to human evolution that has happened in the last Hyperion book. It's about what happens to somebody that doesn't want to go along [with changes or evolution]; somebody that just wants to be left alone. It deals with the Amoiete Spectrum Helix society. Readers expecting a direct sequel to "The Rise of Endymion" will be disappointed, because there's a [lapse of] more than 300 years. But then again, in the universe that I created, where people can travel through time and space, there are a few connections that might please the reader of all four novels. "The Ninth of Av" [due to be published in Destination: 3001, a forthcoming anthology edited by Robert Silverberg], isn't really a story that can be summarized; it'll have to be read by people. The title refers to the Jewish holiday, of course--the ninth day of the month of Av. "On K2 with Kanakaredes" [scheduled for publication in the forthcoming anthology Red Shift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, edited by Al Sarrantonio] is a 65-page novella I just finished. It's about climbing K2 with a six-legged alien. It's a gnarly story. "On K2 with Kanakaredes" is also a more subtle story than the title or basic idea imply. I'm happy with these two pieces. Both "The Ninth of Av" and "On K2 with Kanakaredes" are the stuff that literary legends are made of. I just hope [my editors] think so.
You mentioned that filming of your script Children of the Night, adapted from your novel, was nearing a start date. What sort of experience has writing a screenplay from your novel been for you?
Simmons: I loved it. It was great therapy, if nothing else. I really enjoyed the freedom of deconstructing the thing and breaking it down into images--just the freedom to say in a few images what I needed an entire chapter to convey in a book. I love movies that are the decent equivalent of a book but that don't try to stay faithful to it. The young director, Robert Sigl, and the producer, came over to visit me for a few days in March, which was unprecedented. As a writer, you have to be suspicious and paranoid about any dealings with filmmaking. I admire this director tremendously; he's like a young Roman Polanski (which is the way Steven Spielberg described him). He truly is imaginative and filled with energy.
Principal photography is due to begin in November. If this project goes all the way to completion, at least it's with people I've resonated well with, and a director I know has his own vision. So I'm confident there will be some project up there that I'll be interested in seeing.
Aside from the thrillers, SF short stories and a screenplay, what other projects have you finished or planned for the near future?
Simmons: With The Hounds of Winter (Morrow, 2001), I'm heading back toward that Shirley Jackson or Henry Jamesean type of psychological horror where there's nothing absolutely supernatural about it. You can look at it different ways. I have read only one or two things in my life that scared me. When I read The Haunting of Hill House as a kid, it scared me. And I think the movie was quite well done. It's one of the few wonderfully adapted novels of any sort that stays true to the feeling. I think it's underestimated. So I thought the ghost story was ready for a comeback.
The novel finds the adult (51-year-old) writer Dale Stewart [of Summer of Night] having totally screwed up his life, his marriage and his career, returning to Duane McBride's farm--unchanged since 1960, because a crazy aunt had been living there--in order to find calm and inspiration ... bad choice. The book will be a ghost-story extension of Summer of Night, with Dale returning to Duane's old farmhouse around the turn of the century. This would be my The Jolly Corner, with the ghost of all of us baby boomers in the past four decades (what we could have been, what we turned out to be) as the central haunting.
Haven't you also recently completed a Jim Thompson-style crime fiction novel?
Simmons: It's called Hardcase (due out in spring of 2001, from St. Martins Minotaur), and it's a whole different kettle of fish. My goal was to have no chapters [more] than five pages in length, and a protagonist so mean that no one, not even his mother, could love him. It's dark in the enjoyable noir sense of some of my favorite classic hard-boiled films and Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammet-type tales. The difference here is that the protagonist, Joe Kurtz, is not "the knight in rusty armor" so beloved of detective fiction authors. Kurtz is a piece of work, period. To extend the medieval (clichéd) metaphor--in the Middle Ages, say on the field at Agincourt, Kurtz would have been one of the peasants who knocked the knight off his horse with a giant wooden mallet, and then stabbed the poor fallen hero through every gap, slit, visor opening, groin hinge, armpit gap and chain-mail weakness the hapless knight chevalier had in his armor. Crude and mean, but very efficient. It beat the French at Agincourt. There have always been Joe Kurtzes around and usually they win--they just don't get written about in heraldic history.
Even though you can't be pigeonholed into any one category, you seem to be drawn to writing genre fiction. Why is that?
Simmons: What I'm drawn to are the most interesting tropes and protocols available to the writer--damn the genre boundaries and let the formula hacks take the hindmost. Is Gravity's Rainbow SF? Why didn't Borges go to more World Fantasy Conventions? Is MacBeth dark fantasy because of the witches or Hamlet horror because of the ghost in Act I? All sufficiently ambitious writers are cuckoos in the sense that they'll lay their eggs in whatever nest offers the best chance for artistic survival. The absolute best writers transcend even the need for nests.
Literary critics Walter Pater and Harold Bloom share a wonderful answer to the question of what element describes authors and works that deserve to be "canonical" (i.e., immortal). Bloom says, "The answer, more often than not, has turned out to be strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange." I write across genres, outside of genres and inbetween. Publishers like to establish their writer on one slide and then they want to grease that slide. It makes good business sense--it just doesn't appeal to the creative side of a writer.
