Science fiction great Jack Dann dives into his characters with the gusto of a method actor ripping into a particularly meaty role. He researches their times and climes with academic zeal, rounding out their psyches with his own life experiences—and throwing himself into new and sometimes dangerous situations to capture the reality of the image or transformational moment that inspires each of his stories. So it should come as no surprise that the author of novels like Junction, High Steel, The Memory Cathedral and The Rebel originally hoped to become an actor and even worked with famed director Nicholas Ray.In the '70s, this zest for exploration and transformation led Dann from acting to speculative fiction, where he first made his mark as one of SF's New Wave. The '80s saw him expand his horizons through award-winning collaborations with many of the genre's reigning giants—collaborations collected for the first time in the new anthology
The Fiction Factory. But that didn't push the envelope far enough for Dann. The former "Hermit of Binghamton, New York" needed to live the journey as well as write about it. He moved to Australia and began exploring the uncharted country where speculative fiction, alternate history and mainstream literature collide.
Today Dann enjoys a unique position as a worldwide best-seller whose fiction is celebrated by both mainstream and genre readers. He's also in great demand as an editor, known as the man who brought Australian speculative fiction to world attention in anthologies such as
Dreaming Down Under and
Gathering the Bones. His honors range from the Nebula and World Fantasy awards to Australia's Aurealis Award to being named an Esteemed Knight of the Mark Twain Society. But as far as Dann's concerned, that's just the beginning. He's got an infinite number of universes waiting to be explored—at his trademark 500 miles an hour.
More information on Jack Dann and his many projects can be found at his Web site,
www.jackdann.com.
From your biography, it appears you've always been interested in different layers of perception. What do you think led you in that direction? Dann: I went from Jew to agnostic to atheist. I have spent a good part of my life on a spiritual quest. I think it was curiosity. I basically wanted to experience and explore the nature of how I'm conscious. So a lot of my work deals with consciousness and the nature of time—the enigma of time.
If you look at my earliest work, such as my novel
Junction, in which causality is loosening and time becomes very elastic, you'll find those same elements—the exploration of consciousness and time.
Do you still feel that you're continuing that journey—that there may be another step beyond atheist? Dann: I'm not sure what lies ahead. I have this sense that I stretch with every book, and that one day I'll write my own
Ulysses, which will be grounded in the here and now, that will be another exploration of these modalities. Right now, I have no idea of the form that novel might take. But books come to me ... like gifts. Before I wrote
The Silent, I was asked to write an essay on a book that profoundly unnerved me. That book was
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski. In his introduction Kosinski had a line to the effect that the only thing that was close to his experience of being abandoned and on his own during the second world war were abandoned children who had formed their own feral tribes during the Civil War. I said, "Oh, shit, there's my next book." And I did not want to do the research for it.
I know what my next two books are going to be because I'm working on them now. But yeah, my life as a writer and my "real" life has been exploration. I'm not a kid anymore, but I'm still living at about 500 miles an hour. When I was in my late 40s, I pulled up stakes and moved to Australia.
George R.R. Martin used to call me the hermit of Binghamton, because you could not get me out of my hometown. Upstate New York, for me, was like Kuerner's Farm was to [Andrew] Wyeth. That's where I felt I got all my inspiration, and now I'm living about as far as you can get from home without coming back in the other direction, and I've become one of those ex-pats who is comfortable everywhere, yet a stranger everywhere.
What prompted the decision to move to Australia?Dann: Oh, that was love at first sight. The bizarre thing is that can actually happen. I had, you know, a life, but it was just one of those things when Janeen [Webb] walked across the hall. That was it for me. Three months later I was living in Melbourne, which is sort of a felicitous combination of San Francisco and Paris, and trying to figure out why, when I flicked a light on, it didn't go on. It didn't go on because I flicked it up. The switches are in the opposite direction.
It's the little things that get you. You can do all the big things. But you dial zero, you don't get the operator.
What do you get?Dann: You get nothing. [Laughter.] You dial 911, and you get 9-1-1. That's it. If you want 911, you dial 0-0-0.
How hard was it to adjust?Dann: It was a real learning experience. I wrote an essay once called "Double Vision," because that's how you begin to see, in double vision. When we travel, we take our atmosphere with us. We take America with us. We're the proverbial space cadet.
But it's different once you're living in a country. ... I was fine in Melbourne for about three months. Melbourne is one of the last Victorian cities left on earth (though the developers are destroying that with hammer and tongs). Melbourne's architecture looks almost Asian. If you can imagine Chinese architecture and Victorian architecture melded. That's what it looks like.
I remember walking down Commercial Road. I was walking home from the Prahan Market in the middle of South Yarra, which is a lovely, hippie area—kind of like an up-market Greenwich Village—and suddenly I became absolutely terrified. I couldn't walk. It was like the ground was shaking. It was my first experience with mild culture shock.
Australia looks just like America. It has the same music, almost the same language; it has malls and American sitcoms. But although it looks the same, it's not. It's profoundly different. Even the language is different; it's based on irony. American English is not based on irony.
Everyone in Australia is privy to a lexicon of jokes and aphorisms—a sort of shorthand. The only problem is if you ask a question, you'll only get half an answer—the second half of the aphorism. You're supposed to know the first half!
One day Janeen and I were traveling, and I had to go to the bathroom. So I asked someone for the toilet—you can't say bathroom or they will think you just want to wash your hands. You have to say you want a toilet. So I said, "Excuse me, could you tell me where the toilets are?"
The guy laughed and said, "It's a compass and a cut lunch."
I said, "Look, I have to pee!" And he and Janeen both started laughing ... Janeen and this guy who neither one of us had ever met are both cracking up.
To know why they were laughing, you've got to know the other half of the joke, which is that the toilet is so far away that if you want to get there, you'll need a compass and a cut lunch.
One of Janeen's pals who used to live in Ohio once told me, "Oh yeah, the first year I lived in Australia, I kept falling down." It was the funniest thing, because as soon as she said that, I was OK. But it took me about three years to get the directions right. Nothing felt right. In other words, my compass wouldn't work. It's the same when Janeen is in America. When we were in Florida, she could not get over the feeling that the ocean was on the wrong side.
Do you think that the journey to Australia led you to be more interested in exploring journeys in this world—journeys in time, for example?Dann: Well, since I've been in Australia, I've been writing about America. I had to go away to really examine my culture. I became obsessed with it, so I wrote
The Silent and "The Diamond Pit," which is going to be a novel. It's based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz." It's about America in the '20s.
The Rebel, on the other hand, is about America in the '50s and '60s. So, in a sense, I had to go away to come back.
One last, quick story about being the alien. I grew up in Binghamton, New York. So when I flew back to the States, I took a commuter—it was a prop—plane from New York City to Binghamton. There were a whole bunch of guys I used to work with—I used to work in the cable industry. When I needed money, I'd get a job. Usually in sales.
So I'm hanging out, and all these guys who used to be installers are now making million-dollar deals. These are vice presidents.
We land, and the baggage handlers were pulling the baggage out of the little commuter plane, and they're talking, and I'm listening to them joke to each other, and I'm thinking: "Jesus, their accent is so thick, you can cut it with a knife." Then the dime dropped. It was my accent. Then you suddenly realize—and it comes to you profoundly—that you can't go home.
The reason you can't go home is because you're with your pals, who you grew up with and who you love, who know what a complete asshole you really are, and all the idiot things that you used to do—which is all right, because you can cover it up under a leather jacket. But they knew the nerd. So you sit with these people who you love, who know you and with whom you share all the same common stuff. But you're seeing double, because you can see everything exactly as they do, but you're also seeing something different because you've been in a place where all of the things that work the way they're supposed to work don't any more.
In their world, when you flick a light switch up, the light goes on. This is the way the world works. But I've been living in a world where the light goes on when you flick the switch down. All the little details of your life have changed; nothing is grounded anymore. And yet you're completely comfortable. No one would ever know you were a stranger. But you might as well be in Siberia or Indonesia, because you are an alien. You are the outsider. Perfect for a science-fiction writer.
Talking about mindsets, in an HBO broadcast on the making of their new series, Rome, they talked about how people in ancient Rome did not perceive right and wrong the way we do. For example, it was OK to kill a person of the lower classes, but if a patrician was killed ...Dann: I'll tell you what was wonderful about doing a novel set in the Renaissance—I had gotten ahold of a diary of an apothecary. He was around for the Pazzi Conspiracy [the Pazzi family's 1478 attempt to assassinate Lorenzo de Medici]. As you're reading this rather mundane day-by-day diary, you'll suddenly come to an entry like: "Two-headed boy born in Volterra, who was murdered." Then you'll read: "Such and such a thing happened, and it was because of the spirits." And you suddenly realize that this is a rational human being having a mundane day-to-day life, but he's living in a world where magic is real.
In [Ioan P.] Couliano's book
Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, there's an actual, historically correct depiction of an exorcism. In my novel
The Memory Cathedral, I use this exorcism. The weirdest stuff in the novel is real.
The people of the Renaissance believed that coursing through your blood was something called the pneuma. The pneuma was half substance and half aetheric, and it somehow connected the physical body with the spiritual. They believed that the eyes were the windows of the soul and gave off "igneous rays." That's how you saw things. Our eyes were all like flashlights. And they had some, er, rather interesting ideas about the nature of love. They believed that if you looked at someone, flashed them with your igneous rays, so to speak, you (or they) could become infected with a "phantasm," a miniature, doppelganger soul of the other person. The phantasm would travel along the igneous rays from one person into the other, and it would grow, poisoning the one in love. The body would slowly deteriorate, but the eyes—the windows of the soul—would be luminous. People would be exorcised because being possessed by love was considered to be a known disease, a medical disease.
I used this in my novel when Botticelli falls in love with Lorenzo de Medici's mistress—you know, the one you see in the "Venus on the Half-Shell" [Botticelli's
The Birth of Venus]—Simonetta Vespucci. Leonardo [da Vinci] is there and helps exorcise Botticelli.
In my novel [Niccolo] Machiavelli is a young boy. I cheated a little with that. Leonardo's teacher, Toscanelli, the guy who gave the maps to Columbus, brings the young Machiavelli to Leonardo and wants Leonardo to train him. So Machiavelli becomes Leonardo's apprentice.
It was at that point that the novel started speaking to me and taking on its own life. Leonardo says, "I will call you 'Nicco'." Then Machiavelli says, "Does it make you feel bigger to make me smaller?" And I said, "What the hell is happening here?" It was at that point that Machiavelli becomes a main character in the novel.
And that exorcism scene, which is 50 pages, I did not want to do. It was not going to be in the book. But the characters would not obey the author. They literally went on strike until I wrote that scene. Grudgingly.
That's good to hear. Women writers talk about their characters taking over all the time. You're the first male writer I've met who does the same.Dann: I learned something from Peter Straub. We were sitting around, and Peter was dressed in a three-piece suit. He looked like an investment banker. He said to me, "People expect writers to be wild and wacky. I wear a suit, and it fools them." I'm just being honest right now. Which is probably dangerous. I'd better go and put a suit on. [Laughs.]
Plato was not going to let poets into the Republic, because they were this conduit to everything dangerous that's out there. Although I don't believe this rationally, when I'm writing, and it's "cooking," I can feel that direct connection to the vital stuff of the universe. That's the stuff of mystery and superstition. But if you lose that, you lose your juice as a writer. But don't tell anybody. [Laughs.]
I was intrigued by the fact that The Rebel came out at around 300,000 words on a 100,000-word contract. What was going on there, and how did you cut it back? Dann: When I was writing the book, my film agent kept insisting, "Go get the movie
Wonder Boys." Did you ever see
Wonder Boys? It's about this guy who's writing a novel, and it never ends. It just goes on and on.
I was writing everything out. I was writing it like
A Dance to the Music of Time. Normally doesn't happen. But I needed to turn this mass of material that I loved—because I fell in love with all the characters—into a novel. When I started, I had planned on writing all the scenes from James Dean's point of view. But then I discovered that I needed to write scenes from Marilyn Monroe's point of view and Bobby Kennedy's point of view and Elvis Presley's point of view and Jack Kerouac's point of view. And it got so big it became a universe. It needed to be shaped, reduced, transmogrified into a novel.
As I said at [one of my panels at DragonCon 2005], I had two of the best editors in the English-speaking world, and it's now a novel that's got complete focus. A good portion of the other material—I think we were at 280,000 words (I exaggerated earlier)—was crafted into short stories. In fact, I received a query a few months ago from PS Publishing in England asking me about publishing all the Dean short stories. So that's in train. The collection will be called
Promised Land.
One of the stories in the collection will be an original; the others are reprints. The title story, "Promised Land," can be found on Amazon.com. Amazon's started a new program of original short stories called Amazon Shorts, and they asked me if I'd like to contribute.
In addition to the collections that you've already mentioned, are there any other projects you'd like to share?Dann: I'm also working on two major young-adult anthologies with Gardner Dozois and two more anthologies in our
Magic Tales series. I'm working on proposals for a novel version of my novella "The Diamond Pit," which was a homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and a mainstream novel about a murder in a military academy, which affects the lives of high-level politicians. The mainstream novel is tentatively titled
Extra Duty.
There's more, of course—a short SF novel or novella about a man chasing down the Nazi Josef Mengele, who becomes ... transformed. It's called
The Economy of Light. I'm working on collaborations with other writers and on stories of my own. It's sort of like juggling, I guess.
Will Extra Duty be straight mainstream, or will it incorporate your trademark "spine of fantasy"?Dann: As I envision it right now, it will be straight mainstream fiction. The novel version of "The Diamond Pit," however, will be fantasy—or magical realism.
What was the telling moment or image that set you on the path to Extra Duty?Dann: I've been wanting to write
Extra Duty for years. I was a, um, troubled youth, and was given a choice: private school or reform school. I chose the former, and adolescent that I was, I thought it would be very cool to wear a uniform and carry a sword. I discovered immediately after spending a few days at Manlius Military Academy ("Manners Maketh Man") that a military academy with an active hazing program (that was before they eliminated hazing from West Point) wasn't tremendously cool. Unbelievably, it never occurred to my adolescent mind that there would be no women—and little access to women—at a military school. I wasn't the brightest of teens, I guess.
Anyway, the telling image: It was the first night on campus. I was so frightened, I climbed a tree and hid there. But I was seen, and other cadets gleefully threw a myriad of objects at me to try to get me down. That will form the first scene of
Extra Duty. I remember the hours of disciplinary extra duty I served as a cadet, which involved being forced to march for hours with other recalcitrant cadets in a circle until you served your punishment. (That didn't include actual torture—for a review of that, see my autobiography in
Contemporary Authors.) Anyway, it's all grist for the mill.
What gives you the biggest buzz, the research or the writing? Dann: I started off, believe it or not, as an actor—as a method actor. In fact, in the early days I worked with Nick Ray, who directed
Rebel Without a Cause. And I write using the method. I have to know the material as if it's my own experience. For me the research is the process [for getting that knowledge].
A lot of the research for
The Rebel I had done myself. I had some knowledge of the film industry. I had worked with Nick Ray. I had been in Europe. I had partied hard, hung around with Mafiosi and Eurotrash royals, all that. A lot of the stuff that's in
The Rebel is all the stuff that writers do. I was very political in the old days, involved with politics, the behind-the-scenes stuff, which was useful:
The Rebel is a very political book.
So I kept reading and researching until the characters started whispering to me. That's the way it feels to me. When the characters start talking to me in a very soft voice, I know it's time to write. They become quite insistent. I could be pompous and say I'm creating their characters, but what I'm doing is taking everything that I've seen and read and experienced and putting it through my sensorium. That's what creates the character that I see in my mind. That's what makes the character, whether real or imagined, live. In many cases, I think it may be closer than the biographers. And I've gotten a lot of flack for it. One reviewer was incensed that my Elvis Presley wasn't particularly bright. And seemed to take it as a personal insult that I had described him as having blond hair.
But he did have blond hair!Dann: That's exactly right. He dyed it black. I was a real fan of Elvis; I was one of those pimply kids who tried to be Elvis. I understood that Elvis had an enormous talent, but that did not mean that he had an enormous brain.
Elvis was crazy about James Dean, and after Dean died, he sought out all the actors in
The Rebel and was hanging around with them. So I thought, if Dean didn't die in that accident, if he had lived, Elvis could've made a pilgrimage to meet his role model. Which is what he does. He drives to California with his girlfriend, who doesn't remain his girlfriend. So I have Elvis making this trip, which ends up as its own story ... which isn't in the book. (It will be in
Promised Land.)
What is in the book, which you see from Dean's point of view, is the meeting with Elvis. Of course, at that time Elvis is pimply. He's unsure of himself. In a sense, I used an alternate history to allow these characters to be themselves. That's what made the research for this book so difficult.
For example, if I was writing the scene in this room from Dean's point of view, I'd see you, and I'd write: "Woman wearing green, blah, blah, yacketa, yacketa." But if I'm writing from your point of view, I have to know your entire history. I have to know how you feel. I have to know if your leg hurts. I have to know what you're thinking—all of this. So in a sense, I fell in love with these characters, even though—and this upset people, too—these characters aren't necessarily such lovable people. They were simply real people, warts and all.
If you take a look at
The Memory Cathedral it's written lyrically, and the reviews—describing the book as being, in quotes, "literature"—were wonderful. Then you take a look at
The Rebel; and it's right in your face. As a writer, I gave birth to these creatures, and they're not necessarily the same species. They don't look alike. They don't act alike. They don't wear the same shoes; they might not wear shoes at all. So each book demands a completely different style.
The Memory Cathedral is lyrical, and my Civil War novel,
The Silent, in a sense, had to be internal, almost stream-of-consciousness, because I was showing the horrors of war through the perceptions of an adolescent. But the Dean book is mostly carried through dialogue.
Much more TV generation.Dann: But it's about the TV generation.
Let's talk a little bit about collaboration. You've written with lot of different people, including your wife, Janeen. How difficult was it collaborating with the love of your life?Dann: I'll preface this. I like collaborating. In fact, I have a book out called
The Fiction Factory. It's a book of my collaborations with Michael Swanwick, Gardner Dozois, Susan Casper, Barry Malzberg, and other dear friends. There was a period in my life, in the '80s, when Michael Swanwick, Gardner Dozois, Susan Casper and I were all collaborating and selling almost everything we wrote together to the slicks. We were selling regularly to
Playboy,
Penthouse and
Omni for good money. In those days, it was worth it. You were getting a couple of grand for a short story when other people were getting a couple of grand for a novel. I still enjoy collaborating with other writers. Every collaboration is different, and I'm a pretty easy guy to collaborate with.
But collaborating with the love of your life is really interesting. Janeen and I did a story called "Niagara Falling" that won a couple of awards and did very well for us. She had written some material, and I was happily reworking it. Then I happened to look over at her, and did not see a happy person. In essence, this was the deal: I could screw up her prose all I wanted if I wanted a divorce. So we came to an accommodation: I do NOT screw up her prose.
This is humorous in retrospect ... but only in retrospect. I love working with Janeen, although it's difficult for us to do so. But almost everything we did won awards. I kept saying, "Yes, I know you want to kill me. But this story just won an Aurealis Award. This co-edited anthology just won a World Fantasy Award ..."
So we have a new proposal to do a 10th-year anniversary
Dreaming Down Under, called
Dreaming Again. It will consist of new stories, and it's going to be a difficult one to put together. In other words, it's going to have to be really dynamite, because the first book actually had an impact on the genre.
What kind of an impact? 
