n his quiet, dedicated way, Richard Paul Russo is one of American SF's master storytellers. His fiction is characterized by an understated intensity and an affecting compassion; his depictions of the extreme edges of human emotion and experience are shrewdly observed and crafted, darkly accurate in their insights and strong in their supporting invention. His only story collection to date, Terminal Visions (2000), is a fine showcase of his technique.
Russo's first novel, Inner Eclipse (1988), concerns a quest for the alien on an exotic world, but his attention then shifted to America's bleak near-future urban realities. Subterranean Gallery (1989) features a Californian artistic underground; life in the infernal cities is further evoked in the connected thrillers Destroying Angel (1992), Carlucci's Edge (1995) and Carlucci's Heart (1997). However, Russo has since swung back to expansive interstellar space opera with his excellent novels Ship of Fools (2001) and the just-released The Rosetta Codex.
Science Fiction Weekly interviewed Richard Paul Russo by e-mail in December 2005.
In recent years, your writing has moved from the hard-edged near-future thriller style of the Carlucci trilogy to poetic, metaphysically resonant far-future space opera, as in Ship of Fools and The Rosetta Codex. Is this change of emphasis a permanent one? And what are the different demands of writing these two varieties of SF?
Russo: No, I don't think the change is permanent. One of the major reasons I made the change you've described is that I was afraid of stagnating as a writer if I continued to write novels that were too much the same. When I finished the third Carlucci novel, I knew that I was not going to write another Carlucci book (at least not for some time); more than that, I was determined to write something very different in a number of ways. The result was Ship of Fools, which was different not only in time and location, but in style, and feel, and form of storytelling.
Although The Rosetta Codex is also far-future space opera, it's different in many ways—certainly not a sequel to Ship of Fools, which a number of people asked me if I was going to write. I want to try to do different things with each book so I continue to grow as a writer, stay fresh, keep that writing excitement. While the next novel I have in mind is also a far-future novel, it won't be what I would call space opera, and again will hopefully be a different kind of work. It's also very possible that I will someday return to the near future as a setting, and that I may even write another Carlucci novel—but it will only be when I have something fresh and different to write about that would ask for a near-future setting, and would benefit from Carlucci's involvement.
As for the different demands, I think the biggest difference is the sense of scope and perspective the writer needs to bring to the work. With hard-edged near-future science fiction, the focus is very much the "here and now," with the emphasis on the gritty details of daily life, though in the best there is also a sense of movement toward the future and a sense of the effects of change. In space opera, the perspective is grander, usually encompassing the vastness of time as well as space; one of the main challenges is to hold that wider and vaster perspective while working through the story with individuals who have their own daily lives on much the same scale as those in contemporary or near-future settings.
Reading both Ship of Fools and The Rosetta Codex, one is struck by a kind of literary alchemy you perform: simple, conventional tropes and devices of genre SF in your hands become rich in symbolic implication, radiant with meaning. It's an impressive technique, reminiscent in some ways of the writing of Gene Wolfe. Is SF uniquely well suited to such grand symbolism?
Russo: First of all, thank you for the compliment. Yes, I think SF is very well suited to that kind of grand symbolism. For a number of reasons, one of which is that the writer literally has the entire universe and all of time to work in and with. The SF writer, more than authors in other genres, has at his or her disposal vast scales of time and distance, mind-bending and mind-numbing concepts and speculations, and so on. That's one of the reasons I focused more on SF after beginning my writing "career" with literary fiction—I feel SF allows for a wider variety of approaches to exploring life through fiction.
Unfortunately, that's also a primary reason SF is extremely well suited to coming across as overly melodramatic and lurid as well. To avoid being pretentious and ridiculous, it's important for the writer to take the subject matter of the story seriously, to treat it seriously, at whatever level. That includes humorous SF, too, though the approach will of course be quite different; at least that's my guess—as many of my readers have pointed out over the years, my work doesn't exactly tend toward comedy.
The potential for the grand and the majestic, for deep and resonant symbolism, is at once the strength and the weakness of science fiction, particularly with space opera or other grand-scale tales such as the "dying earth" stories of Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe, among others. It makes for special challenges, but special rewards as well, for readers and writers alike.
You employ a spare, lucidly understated prose style. Yet it seems very well adapted to the baroque, overstated material of space opera. How would you resolve this apparent paradox?
Russo: I believe an understated style can function in two ways to actually enhance the material of space opera. First, as I mentioned earlier, SF in general, and space opera in particular, can easily become over-the-top or absurdly melodramatic. While some might think that ornate prose might be the only way to approach the baroque material of space opera, that kind of prose runs the same risk as the material—becoming "purple," overblown and pretentious. A more spare style can, if used effectively, avoid the risk of florid prose meeting baroque material and turning into a pretentious, overwrought mess.
At the same time, I think a spare prose style can work in another way—by essentially staying out of the way of the material and letting it stand on its own. So much of the material of space opera, if treated carefully and seriously, is inherently wondrous and awe-inspiring. It doesn't need ornate or extravagant prose to convey wonder and awe. I don't want to suggest that a more spare style is the only effective way to approach this kind of material, only that it is certainly one way, and has its own strengths.
Ship of Fools is full of wonders and bizarre perspectives, many attaching to your astonishing gothic starship, the Argonos. How did you manage to make over the raw template of the faster-than-light space vessel into an artifact at once city, cathedral and metaphorical Stultifera Navis, Ship of Fools?
Russo: I think this might be a good time to make the point that much of what I do while I'm writing a short story or novel is ... intuitive, or at least not conscious, and while I am in the middle of a story I could probably not articulate what exactly I'm trying to do, or how I'm trying to do it ... or even what the story is about. After I've finished a complete draft I will have a better understanding of what's going on, and I will spend quite a bit of time actively thinking about and trying to understand the work, so that when I begin revising I can more consciously direct my changes, the shaping of the story.
That said, I always try to make my writing work on more than one level—I want a piece of fiction to work on the surface level of story, but I want resonances and questions and thematic speculations working below the surface, other less obvious stories or character arcs or subtexts. As a reader I get the deepest kinds of satisfaction from stories and novels that resonate on more than one level, and so as a writer I try to create stories that do that as well. Which is, I suppose, a circuitous way of talking about how I approach the raw materials of any story or novel. I try to dig deep into the raw material, to try to understand why it resonates with me, why it might be working at both conscious and subconscious levels.
With Ship of Fools I brought together pieces from various sources that have stuck with me over the years, or which had greatly affected me, or which I thought a lot about. I brought them together, mixing seemingly disparate elements in what I hoped would be new and interesting ways so that they worked with and against each other. Again, a lot of this was unconscious at the time, but in retrospect I can identify some of the sources, though I'm sure I am still unaware of many of them.
For one, the first adult science fiction novel I read, when I was perhaps 11 or 12 years old, was Brian Aldiss' Starship. I don't remember much of the specific plot now, but I still remember the mind-blowing sensation I had reading about a vast multigeneration starship that had been traveling so long that the people aboard had no idea they were on a spaceship, had lost most technology and were like jungle primitives. Because that truly wondrous feeling has stayed with me all my life, I tried to explore and understand what it was about the idea of a multigeneration starship that evoked those feelings in me.
Another element was certainly Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, as was an illustration I had seen in college that accompanied Stultifera Navis, the Latin edition of the original German Das Narenschiff. Other elements were my own concerns about the economic and social stratification of American society and the ever-increasing inequalities, an interest in how religious people thought about the existence of evil, and a dash of Par Lagerkvist's novel The Dwarf.
I don't really myself understand the process, other than to recognize that I tried to bring all these various elements together in a way that was realistic on the story's own terms, and brought them together to create the Argonos and the circumstances that would then provide the setting and context for a meaningful story to develop. That probably sounds a bit vague, but then I'm a bit vague on how it all works myself, even though it's going on in my own head.
Bartolomeo, protagonist and narrator of Ship of Fools, certainly doesn't begin as a paragon of virtue, but succeeds in redefining himself by novel's end—at least to himself. Why did you keep the betterment of his nature so ambiguous?
Russo: I am wary of easy and simplistic resolutions, and try to avoid them in my work. I don't like to tie up every loose end, or bring every subplot or character development to some complete and defined resolution, because that seems too artificial to me, so unlike real life. That applies to Bartolomeo as well, in the context of his world. The reader has a sense of Bartolomeo's evolution as a human being, and Bartolomeo himself has some sense of that as well, but most of the people around him are either unable to see the changes in his character, or at least are not yet ready to accept them. Much more time will be needed, which I think is reflective of the way most people are in real life when it comes to those they have known or known of for a long time—perceptions are difficult to change, especially when they've been long-lived. Someone who claims to have "changed for the better" often has to earn a change in the way others perceive them, and that often takes a long time—people need to see them "in action," so to speak, where they are proving themselves to be truly changed. For Bartolomeo, it has not yet happened. And there is always the possibility that it will never happen, and I don't like to pretend otherwise.
The aliens encountered, but never revealed, in Ship of Fools are terrifying, all the more so for not appearing directly. Did you keep them offstage to make points, both about the nature of evil and about the unsubtlety of SF stories and films that insist on showing their horrors in literal gory detail?
Russo: I kept the aliens offstage for several reasons. For one thing, I am very much in agreement with the implications of your comment about the overt and detailed depiction of horrors in whatever form, whether ghosts or aliens or monsters or environmental terrors. Too much description, too much detail, usually achieves the opposite of what it's striving for, and vitiates the suspense or fear that the writer or filmmaker is trying to evoke. Explicit gore does have its place, along with explicit violence, but I've usually found that the books or films that are the most effective in evoking fear or suspense, that are most disturbing, are those that hold back, that leave much to the imagination. In Ship of Fools I was attempting to convey a fear of the unknown without ever directly depicting the aliens. It seemed to me that the more I showed of them, the less frightening they would become.
At the same time, there is a major thematic conflict taking place among the principals on the Argonos, especially Bartolomeo, Father Veronica and the Bishop, which in part revolves around the nature of good and evil. First the apparently abandoned alien starship, and then the unseen aliens themselves, come to represent evil, whether fairly or not. Again, I felt that actual descriptions of the aliens would tend to strip them of much of their resonance, of their capacity to represent more than just horrible alien creatures. In my mind, at least, for the purposes of the novel, they are much more than monsters.
Although Ship of Fools and The Rosetta Codex have quite a lot in common as literary space operas, they contrast dramatically in two vital respects: Codex's protagonist Cale, unlike the cynical, experienced Bartolomeo, is youthful, innocently earnest; and whereas Ship's aliens are nightmarish, the ones in Codex emerge in a broadly positive, indeed redemptive light. Is Codex a thematic companion to Ship, its conscious reverse image?
Russo: Yes, I do think of The Rosetta Codex as a thematic companion to Ship of Fools, although while you're right that it is a reverse image in many ways, I didn't really consciously approach it with that in mind. What I wanted to do, really, was approach some of the same material in different ways, explore it from different perspectives. As discussed earlier, some of this wasn't conscious, but some was, in a general way. I did consciously want to write about someone who was quite different from Bartolomeo. In fact, while Bartolomeo at the beginning of Ship of Fools is already very much formed in terms of character (though not without the potential for change), with Cale I wanted to explore the formation of character, look at how experience contributes to the kind of person he becomes, and the view of the world and the universe that he develops.
So, too, I consciously wanted to do something very different with the aliens, and look at the other end of the spectrum of possibilities.
Cale's adventures on Conrad's World, in the wild badlands and in the significantly titled city of Morningstar, are both circumstantial and symbolic: the regular experiences of a young man growing up in dangerous surroundings, rendered in gritty detail, and the stages of an allegory, drawn with timeless clarity. These aspects are in marvelous balance; how easy is it to maintain such a fine harmony of elements?
Russo: It's something I work very hard at, so it's always good to hear from readers that, at least for some, I've been successful. Again, I try to make my stories work on more than one level. In this specific instance I wanted Cale's experiences, and the course of those experiences, to suggest more than the individual events themselves, to echo a greater meaning. At the same time, I felt it was important that the experiences be very real, the kinds of events and interactions that someone in his position could in fact really experience. If there isn't that solid grounding in reality, then any mythic or symbolic or allegorical qualities become artificial. I struggle and work to find the resonances in the real, in the hard concrete details of real lives and experiences, so that the two (or more) levels can work with and enhance once another.
Conrad's World embodies a dystopian political geography: The rich lord it over the civilized portion, and consign all dissidents and criminals to the barbaric backwater beyond the Divide. Is this a metaphor for the state of 21st-century Earth? An indictment of the sort of dualism so often practiced in the present—Us versus Them, "Good" versus "Evil"?
Russo: I had in mind a sort of two-level metaphor, actually. I did envision the city of Morningstar as a metaphoric equivalent of our 21st-century world. I also envisioned the "backwater" part of the planet, on the other side of the Divide, as a kind of metaphor for pre-20th-century civilization, while at the same time conflating the two regions to suggest that in many ways there's not a lot of real difference between our "primitive" selves and our "advanced and civilized" selves.
There is an indictment of our current society at work in this book as well. I think we do often operate with that "Us versus Them" dualism, and I believe it's a false and destructive dualism that is effectively "Us versus Us." The "Good versus Evil" paradigm is no better, because it's just as false for the most part, especially the way it is usually employed, and the way we've been employing it in recent years. Recent decades or centuries, for that matter. It reduces complex realities to simplistic and false dichotomies. Which helps no one, in the long run.
No matter what the setting of my novels, no matter where or when they take place, and no matter what is the basic subject matter, I always bring to my work my concerns about life right here and now. My social, political and personal feelings and attitudes definitely influence my fiction, and I wouldn't want it any other way. That doesn't mean my stories are political tracts or pieces of propaganda—at least I hope they aren't.
Cale eventually joins up with the Resurrectionists, a group determined to unearth and interpret the ruins and inscriptions left behind by the Jaaprana, a long-vanished alien species. The sense grows throughout Codex that the Resurrectionists are correct in believing that on its own the human race is too perverse, too divided, too bad to survive on its own: We need stimulation, even guidance from the Other, aliens outside ourselves and our experience. To what extent are you here meditating on our basic religious impulses?
Russo: To some extent, certainly. Because Ship of Fools had religion so much in the foreground, I wanted to keep it more peripheral because it was not my primary interest in The Rosetta Codex. Yet religious or spiritual elements surface repeatedly, primarily in the context of searching for either some meaning in or understanding of life: The anchorite appears to be searching for some kind of understanding through her sacred religious texts; Cale discovers the codex inside what appears to be an altar in a temple or other religious building; and of course the Resurrectionists are embarked on a spiritual quest of sorts, while their name has religious connotations as well.
What I wanted to explore was more general or universal than religious searching. Your question points to one of the major themes of the book, perhaps the main theme, when you explicate the Resurrectionists' assessment of the human race, and the need and searching for something Other, for something beyond ourselves, if we hope to become anything more than barbarians clothed in the veneer of civilization. Often that search takes the form of religious faith or questioning, but it can take other psychological/emotional forms as well. Cale is not religious at all, and yet his search is every bit as deep and serious as any sort of religious quest. I don't pretend to have any answers, either for what exactly we search for, or what we might hope to find, or whether there are any answers or whether there is anything to find. But I do believe that this kind of questioning and searching is vital to our survival and existence as something more than mindless beasts.
Wow, where did that come from? You never know what a question might elicit, do you?
The central villains of Codex, if such exist, are the Sarakheen, cyborg posthumans fearful of any return by the Jaaprana. One recalls that Bartolomeo in Ship of Fools was a cyborg also. What's your view of the posthuman agenda expressed by some SF, the desire to evolve or augment ourselves beyond the human?
Russo: I suppose I'm a bit old-fashioned when it comes to this particular issue. My views are probably not very internally consistent. I'm generally so pessimistic and despairing about the nature of people, appalled at our capacity to harm one another physically and emotionally and in every other selfish way one can imagine, and yet I don't see the path of physically augmenting ourselves as a way to change that for the better, but rather as just another selfish way of dominating others. I don't see it as any more likely to result in "better" psychological/ethical/moral human beings than anything else. It's something that's coming, of course, but I don't see it as "progress."
The final passages of Codex are of transcendent tone and quality: A voyage beyond ordinary space and physics, a massive disentombment of alien revenants ... amazing. How do you set about capturing in prose such a sense of the numinous and all-significant?
Russo: Hmm, a tricky question. I was in fact aiming for a sense of transcendence in the final scenes of the novel, and I assume from your question that I was at least partially successful. Well, in general I think I can at least take a stab at conveying my creative process.
The approach I take is to try as much as possible to truly imagine myself there, in the place and circumstances of the story, imagine myself as the viewpoint character—Cale in this case—and make myself feel as much as possible what I want to evoke in the reader. This goes back to something I said earlier, about taking the material seriously—I know that I'm writing fiction, that the characters and situations do not actually exist, but I try in some important and true way to imagine that the characters are real people, that the setting is real, and that the events of the story or novel are really happening, and then to imagine how that all feels. Then I try to re-create that all in words, using whatever language seems right—more intuitively than anything else in the initial drafts.
When I revise, I work very hard on the prose, particularly in those passages that are critical to the story, sentence by sentence, word by word, now trying to put myself in the place of the reader rather than the viewpoint character. It's very much a matter of feel—do any words or phrases jar; does the prose flow; does the rhythm feel right, both within sentences and from sentence to sentence; does the pacing match the feelings I'm trying to evoke?
Finally I have my wife, Candace, read everything to get another perspective. She is a very perceptive and tough editor, and helps point out passages, paragraphs, sentences and even individual words that don't quite work. An added advantage, I think, is that she isn't much of a science fiction reader, so she doesn't come at the work with a lot of the same assumptions or preconceptions that an avid SF reader might, and that provides a different and helpful angle on matters. Once she's gone through the manuscript and we talk about all her notes and questions, I go through it all again.
This may have been both more and less of an answer to your question than you expected, but hopefully it's somewhat related and of interest.
Very interesting indeed, for both readers and writers. So while we're about it, more on your writing technique: a crucial part of your method is your acute fictional sense of place. Ship of Fools and The Rosetta Codex are wonder-filled novels—such spectacles, barbaric, gothic, futuristic and natural! Do you value SF partly because it can be a kind of ultra-exotic travel writing, a guided tour of the dreamscape?
Russo: Yes, very much so. That's part of why I was attracted to science fiction in the first place, and is still one of the reasons I am so captivated by certain novels, such as Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun; many of Roger Zelazny's novels, like Lord of Light, Creatures of Light and Darkness and Isle of the Dead; Samuel R. Delany's early novels; some of Robert Silverberg's books, like Downward to the Earth; and ... well, I could go on and on. They evoke that over-used but so often appropriate phrase, "a sense of wonder," and science fiction can do that in ways that no other kind of writing can.
That's much of what excites me as a writer, the potential to imagine and create fantastic places and times. I can do that even in my stories that take place closer to "home," such as my Carlucci novels—the son of a friend of mine actually put together a "travel brochure" for the San Francisco of Destroying Angel as a high-school literature class project. I've also had in mind for a number of years the idea of writing a series of science-fictional travel pieces, like travel essays about exotic worlds or cities or other strange and alien environments, a kind of science-fictional version of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. I've played around with that a bit, but haven't yet quite figured out how to make it work.
On a lighter, though quite ambitious note: because of your vividness and economy as a writer, I can easily imagine your books becoming films. If Ship of Fools or The Rosetta Codex were to be adapted for big-budget treatment, who would you favor as director, and as the main cast members?
Russo: This is one of those fun, anything-goes kind of questions, actually the kind of question I will often get from friends or family (who often have their own ideas for cast members, of course). As far as directors go, the perhaps overly obvious choice is Ridley Scott, even though he hasn't done any science fiction for a long time. I always fantasized about him directing a film version of one of the Carlucci novels, but I can also definitely see him directing a movie of Ship of Fools. Two other directors I think of, who might not be so obvious, are Peter Weir and Wolfgang Petersen, for The Rosetta Codex. With Peter Weir, I am thinking of some of his earlier films, like The Last Wave and The Year of Living Dangerously. I also think Wolfgang Petersen has the ability to bring a sense of grand scope that would be necessary.
For Ship of Fools cast members, I'll toss out two or three possibilities for the main characters—after all, it's difficult to know whether other film projects might get in the way of a specific choice. For Bartolomeo, I can imagine Ralph Fiennes or Joaquin Phoenix; probably both of those would seem like odd selections, but they are the actors that come to mind, for some reason. For Father Veronica I envision Helen Mirren, Cate Blanchett or Emma Thompson. And finally, for the Bishop, I can imagine a number of actors in the role: Anthony Hopkins, Jeremy Irons or Bob Hoskins, for example.
As for The Rosetta Codex, I see Christian Bale in the role of Cale. I think he's a terrific actor, and I think he's young enough to get away with playing the younger Cale in his late teen years of the first section, as well as the Cale in his 20s and 30s for the rest of the story (I can also see Christian Bale playing Bartolomeo in Ship of Fools). And while my mind has gone blank for the role of Sidonie, I can see either Laurence Fishburne or Rutger Hauer in the role of Blackburn.
It would be great to see either of these books adapted to the screen, but I'm not holding my breath. Still, it's fun to speculate about it.
The Rosetta Codex was published very recently, but looking ahead, how do your future projects stand?
Russo: I have several projects in the works, at different stages—more than I seem to have time for, unfortunately. I'm working on a couple of short stories which are near completion, and have two or three more in the "thinking about" stage. At the same time, I have begun preliminary work on two different novels: One is a stand-alone adult novel, the far-future one I mentioned earlier, while the other is a Young Adult novel—a first for me. I'm very excited about both novels (as well as the shorter pieces I'm working on), and I hope it won't be another five years before one or both make their appearance.
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