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OtherRealms Issue 29 Part 04
Electronic OtherRealms #29
Winter, 1991
Part 4 of 10
Copyright 1991 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved.
OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original
form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use.
No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other
publication without permission of the author.
All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author.
Interview with an Anarchist: Lewis Shiner
Interviewed at Armadillocon 11 by Alan Wexelblat
Copyright 1991 by Alan Wexelblat and Lewis Shiner
Lew Shiner: I was born in 1950 in Eugene Oregon. My father was in the
National Park Service for most of my childhood and we moved once a
year whether we needed to or not. He would be transferred to another
town or, if we were in a town for more than a year, we'd move to the
other side of town. Just, I guess, to keep in practice or to get to a
better house or a better neighborhood.
So even if I was in the same town for more than a year, I'd still end
up losing all my friends. This turns out to be a completely
paradigmatic background for a science fiction writer. You end up
being jolted into new environments so often that the only continuity
in your life becomes books. These are the things that can move with
you.
Just about every writer I know -- and fans too for that matter -- tended to
have a book in their back pocket. You'd go out to a restaurant with
your parents and you'd have a book and you'd whip it out while you're
waiting for the waiter to bring the food. My parents were always
taking books away from me to make me stop doing this.
Alan Wexelblat: It's true; I've done similar things. When I started
out it was comic books.
LS: God, yes! My parents were hell on me for comic books. This is
one of the great ironies: when I was twelve or eleven one of my
favorite comic books was Rip Hunter, Time Master. I just loved it.
My father read one of those. Here's Rip Hunter going into what's
supposed to be ancient Greece only there's aliens and all this stuff.
My father said, "God, this is shit! I forbid you to read this ever
again." Now here I am at age 38 writing Rip Hunter, Time Master for
DC Comics. I thought that was a real triumph.
AW: Some people who work in comics say they take twice as long because
they feel they're talking to a younger audience and they want to be
extremely careful what they say. Do you feel that you write
differently because you have a different perception of the audience
there?
LS: I may clean up the language a little bit. The Time Masters book
is for general audiences so that's extremely cleaned up. Otherwise,
no. I try to write the dialogue in the natural style that I would
otherwise do. I've made a real effort in all my comics work to keep it
very visual, very cinematic to where it's pictures and dialogue. Very
few captions, if any at all. Just make the stories do the work,
because that's what comics is all about.
You want to be specific in what you tell the artist to do, so you're
not being lazy. But on the other hand, you want to let comics play to
their strength.
AW: How about potentially touchy subjects, like sex?
LS: I'm all over it, in the comics as well. There's a sexual element
in the Time Masters thing where one character, Bonnie Baxter, who was
a very sisterly figure in the old comics, is having an affair with a
college professor when she's called in to join the team. Rip and
Jeff, who are the two main guys, both get very involved with her. She
and Rip are necking, but Jeff is the one who gets into bed with her.
This is a general audiences book, but we can show Jeff getting out of
bed afterwards. The sexual relationship is pretty explicit. I think
it's important; it's not something I ignore in comics any more than I
would in the rest of my work.
A different series I have in development right now is going to be for
mature audiences. There will probably be full frontal nudity in it;
we use lots of language. There's some fairly explicit sexual stuff.
My protagonist has a sexual problem: he's a voyeur. This series is
about the sort of indirection that occurs when people are observing
the world through their computers, through film, with everything sort
of second-generation. For the main character to be a voyeur is very
appropriate thematically, and I'm going to play it up.
In the second issue, he gets burned out on the project he's working on
and goes down to a topless joint, which you don't see that much in
comics. My character's there because he likes it.
I think I'm fortunate my family settled down about the time I was
discovering sex. We spent six months in Africa when I was around
puberty, which is a dislocating, horrible thing to have happen. After
that we kind of settled down. I was in Dallas for all of high school,
then went away to Vanderbilt for a couple years of college. Dropped
out, tried to make it as a rock star, failed miserably.
I went back to Dallas, finished college, got a BA at SMU, graduated in
1973. I went back to SMU simply because my father was teaching there
and I could get free tuition.
I lived in Dallas for another 15 years, in a succession of small
apartments, doing the usual succession writer-odd-jobs: clerking in a
record store, construction, architectural drafting, was a freelance
quasi-commercial artist for a while -- as much a commercial artist as
somebody can be who can't draw. I did a lot of lettering and
technical drawing, the same trick Doug Potter had used with much
greater skill in Houston. You get associated with a print shop and
they need somebody to do some basically simple line art but not
something they can handle themselves. That gave me a certain amount
of business so I hung on to that.
There was a period where I did actually support myself with rock and
roll. I was in a house band at a really awful club called "Boogers."
I never had the phone number, and I'd always have to call and find out
when we were playing. I'd have to call Information and ask for "the
phone number for Boogers" because it wasn't in the book. There'd be
this long pause while the operator tried to decide if I was pulling
her chain. Is this some kid who's just called the drug store looking
for Prince Albert in a can who's now calling the operator looking for
boogers? That was a little humiliating.
About 1976, I got into computers. There was a writers' group up there
and one of the other members was working for a small computer company.
He needed somebody to be his assistant techwriter. He figured he'd
rather have somebody who could lie convincingly than somebody who knew
about computers. He figured he could teach me about computers and
lying was a natural gift that he'd rather find to start with.
He brought me in and I quickly displaced him. I decided this could be
key to my writing career: if I could learn to program then I could
call my own shots. It would be a good thing to do part time; I could
work at home, if I could swing it. I wrangled my way into writing the
language manual and used that as a lever to learn the language and
then started programming.
The company managed to alienate every single programmer they had and
we all quit within four or five months. I went off with one batch of
them and worked for them part time on and off right up until this
year. They're real good friends of mine and have been very
supportive. The little short collection I have coming out from
Pulphouse is dedicated to them.
Seventy-nine was the year I took the plunge and tried writing full
time. I'd tried before a few times, but by then I'd sold a few short
stories. First sale was in 1976; I sold a short to Galileo. Almost
immediately sold another story to a magazine called Mystery Monthly,
but they managed to fold the month before my story was to come out.
Third sale, much later, was to Shayol, Pat Cadigan and Arnie Fenner's
magazine. That also took a couple of years to come out.
So the writing career was really slow and I felt I had to make some
kind of commitment. I was working fewer and fewer hours during the
day; I wrote a novel at night, two pages per day, struggling along.
Finally, in 1979, when my love life was horrible, my job life wasn't
cutting it, I decided it was time to make a big change. I quit
everything, sold my car, packed all my valuables into a storage
building, sent my chapters and outline of this novel off to Joe
Lansdale's literary agent, and took off to Mexico.
Joe and I had done a collaboration and that was in the mail when I
left. I spent two and a half months down there doing a lot of the
research that I ended up using for Deserted Cities. I came to a
crossroads in Mexico: I'd been down there about two months and I had
to decide if I was going to go home or go to Cuernavaca and just drink
myself into some sort of obscurity. Maybe spend the rest of the money
I'd saved up from my years of work and become a professional
alcoholic.
Right when I was having to make this decision, I called home to talk
to my mother. She'd gotten two letters: one from Lansdale that we'd
sold the short story and the other from Joe's agent who was excited
about the novel and wanted me to finish it. So I packed my shit, came
home, took a few things out of storage, and moved down to Austin. I
wanted to be in a real writers' community and I knew most of the
people down here from various conventions.
I got an apartment, rewrote the suspense novel, never sold it. Wrote
another suspense novel, never sold that, though I sold a few more
short stories.
I came to another point where I had to re-commit to the writing. I
was splitting my energy between a rock band and the writing. I felt I
would do better at either one if I committed myself fully. This
occurred about the same time that I married Edie. It seemed a more
appropriate behavior for a married man to be a writer than going off
with the band to Detroit for the summer. In '81 that didn't seem like
a real good idea; they were still killing each other over the ruins of
the auto industry.
I settled into the writing life. Got a PC so I could program at home
rather than having to go up to Dallas constantly. That was when I
wrote Frontera and my career pretty much took off from that point.
Life just basically got more settled and that's the situation I'm in
now.
This year, finally, between the comic book work I've started doing and
various other writing projects -- Wildcards and so forth -- it's gotten to
the point where I was just not able to do enough programming. There
was enough money, I thought, that I could get by without it. That's
gone down to a purely consulting gig. They've hired a new programmer;
I go up once in a while to try and straighten him out. The rest of
the time is spent writing.
AW: What are the new things on your plate now?
LS: The comic book stuff consists of a number of projects. There's
one in development that I hope will turn into an ongoing monthly
series. That's the one I mentioned earlier involving computers and so
forth; it's a non-superhero comic. I think it's fairly revolutionary
for a mainstream comic book. I'm also doing a slot in an anthology
project for DC. I've got other stuff that's merely in the talk-about
stage that will probably eventually happen. I've got a new novel that
I'm beginning to think about; I'm in the research phase on that.
I'm back writing in Wildcards again. Numbering the books has gotten
so complicated because of Book 6 being split into two parts and
Wildcards novels now appearing that we've begun to talk of things in
terms of thematic trilogies. The upcoming trilogy, after we finish
off the Hartman trilogy, is going to be the Jumpers trilogy. I'll
have stories in at least the first two of those three books.
Following that will be the Cardshark trilogy. I've had a fairly big
hand in plotting the whole direction of that three-book unit, so I'll
be working on that. I'm doing the Wildcards comics for Epic which
will be a four-issue Prestige-format series which may be coming out as
soon as next summer. I'm head writer on that, writing a frame
sequence myself and collaborating with the other writers on the origin
stories that will be sprinkled through it. The frame sequence is all
new material and will require loyal Wildcard readers to go out and
purchase this as well as the books. That's happening right now; as
soon as the convention's over I'll go back to working on that script.
AW: Your works are scattered all over style/genre/media boundaries.
Do you like working over this broad a spectrum?
LS: From where I sit, I see many more similarities than differences.
To me, the stories are much too similar. Frontera and Deserted Cities
in particular have a similar sort of structure. Each moves toward a
central location, each has four viewpoint characters, and an outside
military arriving near the end of each book. None of this was
intentional, of course. I woke up after Deserted Cities was out and
realized how much I had recapitulated myself. The fact that they're
in different genres, one sort of c-punk and the other magic realist,
seems very superficial to me. These kind of distinctions don't have
much to do with characterization, structure, theme, and so forth. I
think there's a very strong thematic connection in all my work.
In fact, I was at a cyberpunk conference in Leeds this summer and one
of the participants gave a paper on my stuff. It was not a terribly
theoretical paper; his point was that all my books involve anarchy to
one degree or another. The anarchist is perceived as a positive force
to reawaken a stagnant society. He found this in a great number of my
works. I'll buy into that, particularly since the novel I'd already
finished -- Slam, which he hadn't seen -- is a blatant novel about anarchy.
Genre distinctions or the presence or absence of certain tropes in a
work is a very minor detail compared to the other stuff.
AW: Tell me a bit more about this new book.
LS: The protagonist of Slam is modeled in some ways on Howard Waldrop
in that he's a guy who lives outside of the system. But he's never
hurt anybody. He's kind, he's gentle, he is -- if anything -- too passive
at the beginning of the book. And yet, society has branded him an
enemy because he worked in a used record store, took his payment in
cash and didn't report it to the IRS. Howard Waldrop, of course, does
not do this; Howard doesn't have a job. If Howard had a job like
this, he might be tempted.
Anyway, the IRS busted my protagonist and insisted that he get a job
so they can garnishee his wages for back taxes. He refused to get a
job and was therefore jailed for not having a job. Thus, he has
become an enemy of society. The book chronicles his progress from a
totally unfree condition, when he's in prison, to a condition of
complete freedom by the end. But that necessitates a more drastic
route than I myself have taken. It involves him getting a false ID,
going underground, that kind of stuff. Steps which I hope I won't
have to take. I think, in the circumstances, his position is
completely justified and I support it even if I haven't done it
myself. I like to think of myself as an anarchist.
AW: But you do pay your taxes?
LS: I do pay my taxes, and I don't even cheat. However, I would be
happier about paying my taxes if there was a checklist on the back of
the form 1040 which would allow me to decide how my money was to be
spent.
AW: You're well known not just for your leftist views but also for
your very strong ecological orientation. Is that something that came
out of your father's work, or is that a later thing?
LS: That was probably a later thing. Who knows why that happens to
somebody? The amazing thing to me is that everybody doesn't feel that
way. It seems obvious that if you're sensitive to what's going on
around you, it's hard to avoid those kind of feelings.
AW: So here you are in a creative field, and 'influence' is sort of a
bizarre word to apply to it, but it's there. People read what you
write and they discuss it and they get ideas from it. Do you
deliberately put forth the ideas you want?
LS: Absolutely. Some of this has to be due to my age. People who
were born in 1950, who came of age during the 60s, tend to be more
radical on these issues. There's the horrifying thought that I've
seen in several magazines that we may be merely an anomaly. That this
little bump in the graph of population -- the baby boom -- may be the only
people to whom these things are important. I certainly hope not. But
I think the whole 60s thing that I went through, being fairly radical,
disposed me to my present stance.
It also disposed me to believe that every act in some sense is a
political act. Every work of art has a political subtext, consciously
or unconsciously. And if you consciously try to avoid politics in
your work that's just another kind of politics; therefore, your duty
is to try and control the political content of your work and try to
use it in the best cause you can.
Frontera is an anti-war book. It basically says that it's the duty of
everyone to stop and say: "you may not manipulate me and you may not
co-opt me into your war machine." Deserted Cities is basically the
same thing. You have individuals walking into a battlefield and trying
to take peoples' guns away from them. There's a lot of ideology
tossed around. One of the characters in Deserted Cities is having an
argument with a rebel who says, "without guns ideas have no force."
To which my viewpoint character replies, "with guns all ideas are the
same."
That kind of stuff is very important to me. That may be the main
thing that gets me excited about sitting down to write. That and the
stories themselves and the characters.
This has led to my editing an anthology for Bantam that will be out
probably in the fall of '90 called When the Music's Over. Pat
Cadigan's in it, along with many others. It's all original material.
I required every story in the book to offer a non-violent solution to
whatever problem was presented. This is one aspect of it; the other
is that half the money the book makes -- what would have been my
share -- goes to Greenpeace. I thought that was really putting my money
where my mouth was. I felt I was in a 'put up or shut up' situation.
Thus the title.
My agent is donating half of her money from it to Greenpeace. One of
the contributors is donating all his income from the book to PETA.
It's a sort of attention- and money-generator for those kinds of
causes. Fortunately, no one came along and said they wanted to donate
their money to a cause that I had political problems with, like United
Skinheads Foundation or something. That would have really put me in a
spot. But I think that was taken care of by the people I chose to put
in the book. I don't think there's anyone in there that isn't of a
sympathetic nature. No one who is truly capable of writing the sort
of story I wanted is capable of giving their money to the skinheads.
AW: This may be something of a sensitive subject, since you've edited
this anthology, but there was just a "Feminism in SF" panel here and
one of the things that came up as a comment by one of the panelists
was the idea that often editors will get an anthology together and
only then discover that there are no women contributors. Then they'll
quickly go out and try to find a couple of female names.
LS: Well, I started off concerned that I wanted a lot of women
involved with the book simply because I think there are in
contemporary society different perspectives. It's society-driven in
that there just are some perspectives no men have. And different
approaches to problems. I wanted to get as many viewpoints on things
as I possibly could; unfortunately, I didn't get as many as I wanted.
I've got some very close friends, who are women writers, who I went to
right away: Pat Murphy, Lisa Tuttle, and several others who I really
wanted a story from. Pat Murphy had written one of the paradigm
stories that I told people to go read if they wanted a model before
they wrote something for the anthology: "Art in the War Zone." But
Pat simply couldn't do it. Lisa simply didn't have time; she was
overbooked.
And stories flooded in from white, Anglo-Saxon males. God, what are
you going to do? You get brilliant story after brilliant story by
white guys. I resisted it; I fought it. In one case I had to reject
a guy because he was white. A good friend, he'd written a great
story, but I had to say: "Sorry. Got no more room for you." I know
reverse discrimination is unconstitutional, but they were willing to
put up with it. They saw my point. I was also very concerned with
trying to get some stories by foreign authors, which proved to be an
unbelievable hassle.
I did get some women writers: Nancy Kress, Pat Cadigan, Marian Henley.
I discovered a new writer named Sherry Coldsmith, bought her first
story. Those are all the women writers I got, but it wasn't from lack
of effort.
I think if I were to say I was a feminist it would have kind of a
bogus sound to it. It would be like trying to claim something I'm not
really entitled to. But I think to say that I'm a pro-feminist is
fair. I'm certainly very concerned with the issue and it hasn't been
addressed very well in any of my fiction. But that's coming up; in
the new book I'm consciously trying to work with some of that. I
think it's desperately important and I care very much about it.
Let me end things by saying this: Whether I'm working in comics or
prose or Wildcards or anything else, the thing that's really
motivating me is the desires I have for the particular story I want to
tell. Early on, I tried to adapt myself to the medium and wrote to
what I perceived the market to be. It just didn't work; I wasn't very
good at it. What success I've had has been from my writing from the
heart to the best of my ability, so that's what I do.
AW: I think you do very well and I look forward to seeing how the new
projects turn out.
LS: Thanks.
------ End ------
