TALES OF LOVE AND DEATH: DAN SIMMONS

Interviewed by Leigh BlackmoreFirst published in Australian SF Writers News

(1993)

The interview was conducted on March 2, 1993 at a hotel in The Rocks area of Sydney through the courtesy of Hodder & Stoughton (via Jane Gillman, their Publicity Manager). Terry Dowling, who interviewed Simmons for The Australian just prior to my arrival, sat in for my interview, which was the author's fifth interview in a fully-scheduled day. Just who is Dan Simmons? I tried

my best to find out...

LB: "We've heard a lot about Dan Simmons the writer but perhaps not so much about Dan Simmons the man. What got you started being interested in science fiction and fantasy and horror. What it something that as a boy you were interested in?"

Simmons: "I loved it as a boy. I mean I can trace it to the day when I just got into first grade, I read one of my older brother's ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION magazines, and I know now it must have been an A. Bertram Chandler 'Rim' story because I remember that some character threw up in zero gravity. What are we talking about, 1956, or 1955 or something, and my little tiny brain catching that wonderful image of people chasing around with a net, and someone being sick in it was just amazing - this was LITERATURE as far as I'm concerned, and it never really faded. So after that, part of me always thought in terms of science fiction.

LB: When you started writing, was it science fiction that you had a natural leaning towards?

Simmons: I wouldn't say it was a natural leaning towards, but I decided I really wanted to be published by 1979, and - ah - I knew the odds. I did enjoy writing science fiction type stuff, and that's where the short story market is, so it was a pretty cold and calculating decision but since I tried it anyway...

LB: [Harlan] Ellison's introduction to PRAYERS TO BROKEN STONES tells the story of the writers' group or the workshop where your story was singled out and so on - is that something that you did a lot of in the process of becoming a writer?

Simmons: Workshops?

LB: Yes.

Simmons: None - I refused to go to any workshop, I refused to pay anybody, I knew that that was anathema to being a writer, and it wasn't until two years of trying to get published, and having a story accepted by GALILEO magazine and it folded; and a story accepted by GALAXY, in its last days, and it folded; and I realised now I wasn't going to get published ...I really felt that for a while, so I gave up; I decided that publication was not that essential for me, that writing could be a hobby, and at that point my wife said, well, there's this workshop, and there's writers there, and she mentioned Harlan Ellison, and so I said, well, now that it doesn't matter, I'll go out to a workshop, and that's when.....

LB: So that would have been a turning point of sorts for you?

Simmons: Not of sorts - it's one of the few that we all have in our lives when we can look back and it's just like suddenly a door pops into existence, and either you go in or you don't. And it was that obvious at the time - this was a turning point no matter what I decided.

LB: I wanted to ask some questions about, I guess, the relationship between some of the short stories you've written and the various novels, because a number of the short stories in PRAYERS TO BROKEN STONES, for instance, have a relationship to a particular novel, and I was curious as to what your thinking was there..?

Simmons: Well my thinking is a little bit different than my official policy position, which is that short stories and novellas should not be stretched into novels. And if the story succeeds in short story size that's where it should remain. I wonder about it when I continually re-mine material that I wrote as a story in OMNI or something like that, and I do have a theory about it, which is that I always have been a novelist, and that the stories - in particular the story that later became part of the book HYPERION, and "Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams", which became the seed crystal for THE HOLLOW MAN, I knew at the time that they weren't satisfactory short stories. Most of what I was trying to say in them needed a larger canvas. I knew that honestly at the time, I thought I just...I've always had high standards of my work and I was disappointed ....but now I think it was the form of some of those stories, the short form that frustrated me, and I'm more comfortable working on the novel-size canvas.

LB: I wondered whether there was some sort of conscious attempt to intermesh the worlds of the different stories - for instance that character Vanni Fucci who is in the televangelist story and crops up again in THE HOLLOW MAN - that's similar in a way to things that Michael Moorcock or some other writers have done where they intermesh the worlds in their fiction ...

Simmons: I really don't want to intermesh; I do have some separate worlds in which certain things take place. I'm working on a novel right now set in Hawaii, which is my SUMMER OF NIGHT universe, and a character from

that; I don't want to do too much of that, but there are three books - in the first book they're children in 1960, and in CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT I have one of the children grown up to a priest, and in this third book I have one of the girls as a supporting character. But I don't want them wandering throughout my books. But Vanni Fucci is very simple - that first short story I used Vanni Fucci in was sort of a throwaway story, it was funny, but Fucci is one of my favourite characters of all time - [animatedly] - anyone who can stand there in Hell and give God the fig has learned his lesson well...

LB: (laughing) It's a funny story, very satirical...

Simmons: I enjoyed it, and I enjoy reading it, because it drives people away, I actually emptied out half an auditorium when I was in South Dakota. But then when I wrote THE HOLLOW MAN, I was dealing with Dante's Inferno, and I could not dispense with Vanni Fucci.

LB: That leads me a little bit into asking about the literary kind of background to some of your novels and stories. I mean to me that seems unusual, actually, in that a lot of writers these days aren't very well grounded in the classics of literature, and you know, in HYPERION you've got Chaucer and Keats, in THE HOLLOW MAN you allude to TS Eliot...

Simmons: I think some writers are well-grounded but of course they're working in their own style with their own material, and that's one reason to avoid it - but you're right, in that a lot of writers just are - not recreating the wheel, but starting from zero. It's a little bit like American films, because so many of the young directors are so profoundly gifted, but they grew up on comicbooks and - movie serials and - I mean, shallow stuff. It doesn't matter how much of a gift you bring to your art, if it starts shallow it will end shallow. I admit that I'm not well-versed in the classics, I've had some education, and I've educated myself as I get older, and as I write I like to play with those things.

LB: Specifically from the point of view of writers, because this is aimed at people who may have had some publishing success (or are setting out to be published), do you have any tips from your experience, any sort of cogent advice that you'd give to writers in regard to how to be published and how to succeed?

Simmons: The obvious first cogent advice is, 'Be very wary of advice from other writers'. It sounds silly, but it's true, I think everybody's career and experience and style are so different...There are a couple of things I've discovered that beginning writers don't think about; one is, what will you allow the market demands to do to your writing? Do you restyle your stuff? And the second thing is - well the odd thing - is, how much of a public persona do you want to have? And it's the furthest thing from a beginning writer's mind to worry about that - and yet I've talked to so many from Stephen King down to the shyest writer who's just published two stories - you don't think about that until it's time to decide - do you want to go

public, be able to speak in public, will you travel on tour, will you go out and sell your work? And I think it's a gigantic decision, and when a writer decides 'no', then I think it's a noble decision but it sets certain limits on what writing means as a career...I guess it sets a lot of limits on that aspect of your career. It sounds petty I guess but writers think of themselves as public figures, it's something that happens to you. And the last thing in the actual writing is, do they have any sort of career plan at all? Most of us just finish a book and we wait for the inspiration for the next one...but I had a simple career plan, I actually went to New York - borrowed money, went to New York, stayed in a flophouse on Times Square, walked the 48 blocks to my agent's office...He was out, so I waited half a day, but I laid out the plan on his desk. It was that over the next seven years, I'd like to be able to continue doing what I'm doing now, which is write whatever I want to write next and have it published. It wasn't much of a plan, but it's one I've kept to.

LB: To what extent do you think you planned for the success, the critical acclaim that you've had - the awards and so on?

Simmons: Well nobody can plan for any sort of success. The only thing you can do is know that if your books ARE a success, you notice that - especially genre awards - that invariably it's an arc, and as soon as the awards start to arrive you're over the top of the arc, and the next part's going to be painful, because it's fun for reviewers and purists and others to discover you and to mention you, but once you're discovered by a lot of people, it's time for somebody to take a big bite out of your backside, which is all par for the course I think. I take it just about as seriously as I do the awards.

LB: There are a few of your works I haven't tracked down, such as the Lord John Press book ENTROPY'S BED AT MIDNIGHT, and I wondered for the sake of people who might not have been able to see those because they're a bit restricted...Can you say a few words about the theme of that book?

Simmons: That novella ENTROPY'S BED AT MIDNIGHT is something that's very personal to me; I didn't mean for it to be as limited an edition as it was - there were about 300, or 500 copies or something and they disappeared - I can't find any - if you find any let me know! - but the story was about as personal as I could make it. And now what I've done is taken that theme of love and death - and made five novellas - or added four more I should say, so ENTROPY'S BED starts off the collection and each of the other four takes the same theme and rotates it a little bit in the light and... I don't know if it's good but I know I feel satisfied with end of this project which just was finished this last month ....

LB: Do you see any big distinction between the horror and the science fiction books that you've written?

Simmons: Every sort of distinction - like which parts of my mind work when I'm writing, to the readers I meet when I go on tour. There is a huge

difference I think. I'd love to see a CATscan of us writers when we write different things. I'm convinced that one part of our brain would be worn with science fiction, and other parts worn with horror...yeah, they're quite different.

LB: Very few writers seem to encompass both directions - either you have hard science writers, or writers who concentrate on supernatural horror - do you find it as easy to write one as the other, or do you prefer writing one sort of novel to the other?

Simmons: I prefer writing one or the other when it's time to write one or the other; and that sounds silly, but it's true that if I just had to write horror novels I would just draw a warm bath and lie back and open my veins - it just gets me down after a while, they are so human and so personal - emotional - dark - even my optimistic horror novels. Science fiction could have the same effect for a different reason in that you're always constructing everything out of whole cloth. Nothing can be taken for granted. You can't get in the vehicle and start it up and drive off by God, you have to explain it- that gets so tiresome! But writing one for a while, getting sick of it and switching to the other is really therapy. It works out fine - plus I'm doing my third mainstream type thing as well; it's worked so far.

LB: What would you class as your mainstream work?

Simmons: Well, it's the favourite novel of mine, PHASES OF GRAVITY, it's a mainstream novel but it wasn't marketed that way...

LB: It's packaged as science fiction...

Simmons: It sure is - Bantam Spectra - now they started - they weren't going to, because Spectra was going to be between genres, outside of genre - but it wasn't, so...I mean I challenge a reader who just comes in from the outside to read that and say it's science fiction, because there is no science fiction element in it - except that there's one Apollo astronaut who's not real. That's not science fiction...it's fiction.

LB: A continuing theme through a lot of the work that I read of yours is - a sense of history I guess. Obviously that's important to you for one reason or another, but can you comment on how that helped your world-building - that type of idea, particularly in science fiction, where you're creating whole worlds...?

Simmons: I think there are two ways to use an interest in history, a sense of history, in writing science fiction. One way is what I think of as a sort of abstract - you take something and give it a kind of flavour and you give it 1940's, 1950's attitudes in the far future, and you create this wonderful tapestry that has no texture to it - a different place and time - it's just sort of us in the future: you imagine Isaac Asimov's characters from the FOUNDATION novels wearing leather WWII bomber jackets and singing

'Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me', but in a spaceship. And that works fine.

And the other way is, my interest is, to suddenly capture this vivid historical texture - to me Jack Vance does it. I love history for that sense because if you read about the 13th century in detail and if you find a good writer, in my opinion it will be more real than any science fiction I have read. I strive to do it, and I guess I succeed some of the time. I'm not a historian, but if I can get a flash of what it must have been like at some point in history - or what we must look like at this point in history to some disinterested observer, then I like to write about the texture;so I guess I'm more Jack Vance than Asimov.

LB: There's a lot of contemporary history too - Vietnam - well, things going right through from the sixties - I guess CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT is very contemporary with its theme about - I'm going to say whether it's about AIDS or not, butit relates to that sort of issue...

Simmons: It's definitely about AIDS, I mean that's why I wrote it. I didn't want to write about Dracula, but I decided to - I realised I wanted to write about AIDS and about Ceaucescu. Yeah, there's so much in it of things that interest me at this point in my life, which is..You know, this whole generation of us are writing these things, it would be genius to write something that will be read five years or ten years or even fifteen years in the future and not be terribly dated, and I think that nothing is obsolete as fast as science fiction. Horror lasts forever - if it's really scary, it'll probably always scare - although Stephen King's stuff is so rooted in his life and our generation that that's another question again...

LB: It's interesting you should say that because I've thought quite often that horror fiction has a timeless quality. Sometimes science fiction lacks that - it's only twenty minutes into the future...

Simmons: It's interesting how limited science fiction is, but to get through that minefield of writing science fiction that will last- I think that's a tremendous accomplishment....

LB: I think you've done it with the characters particularly. Some of the characters are strong enough. That's the way I felt when I was reading HYPERION, for instance, that the characters carry it through. I mean it's set in the far future anyway, so such things don't tend to go out of date too quickly...

Simmons: HYPERION is so far in the future that the technology - I give reasons for their technology being so primitive, you know, as if they're valid, but essentially it's just my own impression - my imagination does not extend anywhere beyond six years from now. I can't create a believable 3000 A.D. technology, I just simply can't do it, but I know that human beings are worth caring about, so that's what I concentrate on.

LB: There's a lot of cyberpunk-oriented technology in HYPERION - I'm thinking of the cyberpunk writers who write a lot about computer networks and that kind of thing - I mean if you were not basing that on some kind of heavy scientific research...?

Simmons: I'm basing it on cyberpunk science fiction! I mean, much of HYPERION is an homage to the science fiction I began reading again. It wasn't until I started publishing it that I began re-reading it. There were just a couple of writers - Harlan Ellison is one, Edward Bryant is another - who literally kept me reading science fiction, otherwise I'd given it up, I'd outgrown it. But then when I started writing and publishing I said 'gee, there are a lot of good writers out there' and I started reading again. The first time I read Bill Gibson and saw cyberpunk - I thought 'wow, this is a massive infusion of energy' so then I did HYPERION; it's just an obvious genuflection in his direction. But I'm not going to imitate him - that's a losing game.

LB: There was some movie interest in CARRION COMFORT - I believe you mention it in the notes to the story [in PRAYERS TO BROKEN STONES]. Has there been any other movie interest?

Simmons: Well, several things have been optioned, and CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT is optioned right now and part of the package was for - oh God, I can't remember the guy's name, he directed THE EXORCIST - Billy Friedkin - Friedkin was supposed to be part of the deal, but you know that's just talk. With CARRION COMFORT it was optioned - Laurel Productions wanted to see if I could write a script so that - two TV scripts later...

LB: That's George Romero's company isn't it?

Simmons: Well, Romero was involved with them at one point. I did two little MONSTERS episodes that appeared on TV - found out how to create something with three actors - two of them could speak - and a twenty-five-dollar special effects budget (laughter). Then Edward Bryant and I did a treatment for CARRION COMFORT which is one of the more bizarre episodes of my life, because here's a fifteen-hundred-manuscript-page novel, that we're supposed to turn - you know, one minute equals one page of a screenplay (laughter) so - 'Could you whittle this down to a hundred and eighteen pages, preferably down to a hundred?'- and I did that by throwing out subplots and characters and trying to keep the essence of it, and for once it was the producer that said "Put this back in" and "No you can't take (Coney Harod?) out" and "Keep this character" and...So it ended up with this marvellous LONESOME DOVE mini-series thing that they wanted to go theatrical and we were going to go ahead for an actual screenplay and then some fella from Maine named Stephen King said "Well, I'd like to do a screenplay of that some time" and everyone just stopped. I mean he was busy, so....

LB: Are you particularly keen to work on screenplays or in movies as well as on novels?

Simmons: Our whole generation is keen to do it. I mean I'm not going to kid you? I KNOW that it's a mistake, I know that every experience everybody I know has had in Hollywood -everything I've read, everything I've seen - says it's a mistake, a novelist should stick with novels; but it's a mistake that I think all of us want to try at some time, and I'm going to if I get the chance.

LB: Back on the writers' point of view I guess - some writers would probably be interested to know if you have an agent - I guess you do - and what sort of relationship you have with that agent. You were talking earlier about having set out your plan - do you have the same agent now as you did then?

Simmons: Yes, I've had the same agent from the beginning. I sold my first short story and then I set out to sell my first novel; I went to Richard Curtis. And it's worked out. Richard understood what I wanted when it was not practical, when it wasn't to his advantage to have me trying to write these different things. I created innumerable headaches for Richard, and he suffered them in silence. We've followed the path that we decided on years ago, so he has a good track record. It's worked out very well.

LB: Some people don't recommend taking on an agent until for instance you've sold a novel or two. When you decided to go to an agent, and basically, I guess, put your future in his hands - why did you decide to do that?

Simmons: Well I live in Colorado. The people who buy the books are in New York. And I wasn't about to move there and go door-to-door; and I know mailing them in, I know what that is like, I've seen the slushpiles of things coming in the mail...

LB: So it was a person-to-person thing?

Simmons: It was more than that, I had a dayjob, I was a teacher. I wrote my first novel between late June and mid-August and then I had to go back to work; so somebody has to sell the thing, so I give it to an agent. And I think for those few people who are skilled at being everything - the writer, the creator, their own editor, and then selling their own stuff - that's fine - but you still have to be somewhere you can do it. It's very hard to be successful at that...I'd rather have the agent the way I did, which was be a nobody with no name, and know that you liked my book, and stuck with it for two and a half years trying to sell it - that created quite a relationship between us. And things got better for me after my fifth book and the relationship is getting better...

LB: Just to backtrack a little bit and talk about horror...One thing I found interesting is that there's very little overt supernatural horror (in your

work) - to me a lot of the horror seemed to be very realistic, grounded in reality. For instance, BANISHED DREAMS, which is the excised material from SUMMER OF NIGHT - the scene there with the underground tunnels in Vietnam - it's a very horrifying episode, but there's no ghost element. Is there any particular reason why you've not gone in that direction?

Simmons: Just the personality; I think the personality of my writing. Sometimes during a radio interview I'm asked similar questions. During an interview on Radio 25 in Los Angeles and the question came up "Do you believe in these things, ghosts?" - "No, absolutely not". "Do you believe in UFO's?" "No". "Bermuda Triangle?" "No!" It turned out I believe in nothing - and we had angry calls for almost two hours: (laughter) "How can you write about this if you don't believe it?" Well that's just really a simpleminded feeble question if you think about it. When I read something that requires willing suspension of disbelief I'll go so far and for me, as soon as the supernatural is just assumed, without at least creating the proper atmosphere for it, I check out. So when I write about vampires I have to do two months of medical research to show myself how vampires could exist...

LB: Okay. Well, that's all the questions I have for you. I wish you well for your Australian visit, I hope it all goes well and you take good memories back to the USA.

Simmons: Oh, I bet I will..