alter Mosley was not met with open arms by publishers when he sent his first novel out in 1989. As he tells it, their response was, "Well, you have to understand. White people don't read about black people. Black women don't like black men. And black men don't read." Mosley thankfully did not listen to them, and Devil in a Blue Dress was published in 1990 to widespread mainstream acclaim and success. It launched the best-selling Easy Rawlins mystery series, proved that black men, when given something that speaks to them, do in fact read, and made the editors that passed on Mosley's work eat crow. Through the Rawlins mysteries, Mosley fulfilled his desire to use popular fiction to create a sense of history for blacks, "One of the things is, historically, we [blacks] haven't written a great deal of popular fiction about our lives, and about our movements, and it's something that needs to be done."
Mosley has made a career of defying expectations and escaping the labels that publishers have ascribed to him, working increasingly outside of the mystery genre, with forays into literary fiction with his novel RL's Dream, science fiction with the best-selling Blue Light and non-fiction with his examination of race and class at the end of the 20th century in Workin' on the Chain Gang. Mosley's forays into other genres has not kept him from creating two other detective series, the recently inaugurated Fearless Jones series and the Socrates Fortlow stories, which were adapted into Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, an original HBO film starring Laurence Fishburn. Although he is not a writer who allows himself to be defined solely by his race, Mosley has strongly supported black writers and publishers through supporting independent black presses and bookstores and by helping establish a degree program in publishing at City University of New York targeting urban youth.
Mosley's latest book, Futureland, is his second foray into science fiction, a series of nine interconnected stories which reflect on some of the prevailing social issues of our time as they might manifest themselves a few generations into the future. In Mosley's vision of the future, the world is controlled by corporations, and individual freedoms have been greatly limited through technology and the changing nature of labor. The world is divided into those who work for the system and those who don't—the unemployed undesirables and misfits who are relegated to the purgatory of Common Ground, a permanent welfare from which it is difficult to escape.
Out of this world spring characters such as Dr. Kismet, the billionaire industrialist behind the world-controlling Macrosoft empire, Ptolemy Bent, the smartest man in history, who monitors radio waves and discovers a form of intelligence which he at once believes is God, and Folio Johnson, the Electric Eye, the last private eye in New York who is permanently wired to the net through an implanted electronic eye. Through the stories in Futureland, Mosley continues to create a pop-culture mythology for blacks, even as he deals with the issue of race, most chillingly in the story "The Nig in Me," in which a biological weapon created to wipe out people of color from the Earth backfires on the white supremacists who intended to use it.
You are best known for writing in the mystery genre, but you have increasingly worked outside of that genre. What does science fiction allow you to do that you can't do in other genres?
Mosley: In science fiction you don't have to accept the world the way it is. You don't have to run around saying, "I'm constrained by these notions of society, by these notions of history, by these general notions of morality." All of these notions or any one of them can go out of the window, and I think that's for anybody. For black people in particular, the future is all we have because the past has been taken away from us and the present is defined in certain ways. You can't write today about our president, or our senator, or our multi-billionaire industrialist. Black people tend to get pushed into certain cubbyholes that at least white people in the culture don't, and so what you can do with science fiction is you can make a whole different world. You could say, for instance, that in the year 2060 there are only black people. You don't even have to say why. In that way, you can begin to create worlds which become interesting and also become yours in a certain way.
Where does the Electric Eye fall in the spectrum of hardboiled detectives? How do you think being connected to the datastream changes the role of the detective?
Mosley: In one way, it gives you a great deal of information. He could be the smartest person in the world, that is, if he understands the information he is getting, and if the information he is getting is true. Both of these things for a large part of the time aren't true for Folio. So in one way, having access to all of that information, all other things being equal he would be the greatest detective in the world. However, because he doesn't necessarily understand the information that he is getting, and because there are forces at work keeping him from getting everything that he needs, it isn't that different.
Do you think that technology and access to information will create a greater divide between the haves and the have-nots?
Mosley: I think all throughout history, the greater the power, the more centralized the use of that power. I don't think there is any time where somebody got greater technology, greater power, greater ability to bring people together, to make their lives better. The more power you get, the more it trickles up, as Ronald Reagan forgot to say. I think that the idea that technology is going to liberate us is false. All you have to is look at that 50-year span between 1950 and the year 2000. The amount of technological advance in those years that should open up people's lives is immense. Washing machines. Dishwashing machines. Vacuum cleaners. Machines that will paint walls. Prefabricated houses. Quicker ways to make cars. Cheaper telephones. All of these things happened. Thousands of things happened. And so how do people live today? Now two people have to work in the family instead of one. It certainly didn't liberate us. It's made us work harder. People have less money. And it's not because they've become less intelligent or lazy. What's happened is that the whole system, the whole structure has made it more difficult for us to have enough to stay alive.
What do you think of the promise that many people felt that the Internet could have as a vehicle for social change?
Mosley: It would be wonderful if the Internet was a panacea, but it isn't, and it never was. It wasn't a panacaea, because it doesn't matter how much information you put on the net. It's how you assure the quality of that information and how you organize it that matters. People being able to get what they need to know and to be certain of that knowledge. The problem is that the only way to do that costs a great, great deal of money, and people trying really hard to organize themselves in that information. And because the easiest place to organize it is the television set, and because television is working on a cable system, and that cable system is a perfect fit for the Internet, it means that all that information will be centralized and you'll have to pay for it. So you'll be lied to, and you'll have to pay to be lied to. And I always thought that that was going to be the way to do it. Now, will there be a rogue Internet or a phantom Internet like there is in Futureland? I hope so, but I'm not quite sure how that will work at this point.
Many of the stories in Futureland deal with the relationship between technology and spirituality. What do you see as the relationship between the two?
Mosley: : Technology for me is a tool. A hammer is technology. A stick is technology. A piece of rope is technology. A rope tied into a knot is technology. It doesn't really matter how advanced these things get. With these tools, we're able to question more. With these tools we're further able to articulate questions about the universe, and also test our notions about the universe. I think technology has always been a part of spirituality and the notion of trying to find out who we are and what we are. Physics comes back to the philosopher's question, what is existence? What is my life? What does my life mean? I also think it's human nature, to seek meaning, to seek meaning beyond does this mean I can have food, does this mean I can have sex, does this mean I can reproduce?
I think all of these notions of these mechanical kinds of things are pedestrian, and the things that become more interesting is how we organize our society around those mechanical things? What are our relationships? How do we organize labor? How do we define ourselves? What do we allow to happen to people in the name of progress?
You've published several stories as first-run e-books. What do you think the future of publishing is in relation to the Internet? What do you think is the future of the printed book?
Mosley: I'm not sure that the future of publishing is in the Internet. The Internet one day will be television, and I think it will be called something else. The Internet is a primitive form of what is to come. It's like Morse code. I think that certainly because of ecological needs, and certainly because of costs, digital and electronic publishing will gain more and more acceptance and usage with people all round the world. And they will displace a lot of paper publishing. And certainly one day in some future, it will replace all of it. I don't think that's going to happen any time soon. A printed book will survive. And also there are certain dangers to electronic books, especially if those books contain information. That information can be changed according to other people's desires, needs, wants which is completely scary. Another important aspect of paper books is that they last longer than digital at this moment. You could write it today, and 500 years from now it would still be printed. If you've made something digital, it will disappear in much less time than that. So, printing, especially the things that are important, is necessary.
How is this going to affect the writer?
Mosley: I think the real question is how is this going to affect the book. The book is one of the few ways that you can excite aggressive thinking within the mind of a person. You can do it through relationships. You can do it through personal exploration and experimentation. And you can do it through reading. These are the three different ways I know that people have aggressive thinking. I don't think radio does it. I don't think television does it. There are a lot of mediums that just don't cause you to think in a way that causes you to grow. Somebody writes a book on the Internet and they write a sentence that says a train whistle was blowing in the background, you can say, "Well, why do you say that? I'm on a computer, I can have a train whistle blowing in the background as I'm reading. Why do I need to read it? I can have James Earl Jones or Mickey Mantle or Muhammad Ali read it to me because I can get their voices on here." And so the book slowly becomes a multimedia experience which tends towards television. And therefore weakens the book, and I think that's a problem.
Are there any resources on the Internet that you think are useful for blacks?
Mosley: It still is true that the greatest resource is your mind and how your mind works. It's a lot less important about specific technologies. One needs to be able to gather information from technology, so you have to be able to exploit the Internet. Now whether that is you doing it or somebody you work with or some other people giving out that information, I don't know. You know what I'm saying. Because a lot of times, I find that the Internet is often like the rice paddies. It's labor-intensive. Not worth my time. When I need to do research I usually have somebody else do it, because I know it's going to take eight hours, and in eight hours I can do a whole lot of writing. You have to understand what's available in your world and you have to know how to use your mind in relation to those things. And this isn't just for black people, it's for everyone. The truth is that we're in the 21st century and race is not the most important thing in the 21st century.
You have been very prolific writer in the last 10 years. What drives you to write?
Mosley: I want to write our stories, our history. The only way you can see yourself is through the eyes of others, and that's the writer's major job, to create a story in which other people can see themselves, and recreate themselves.
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Also in this issue: Billy Crystal and the creators of Monsters, Inc.
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