ohn Kessel, born in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1950, is the author of some of the sharpest, wittiest SF of the last three decades. A professor of English at North Carolina State University (his fiction is highly literate, profoundly meditated), he has written three novels:
Freedom Beach (1985, with James Patrick Kelly; fascinating, fragmentary, oneiric), Good News From Outer Space (1989, a much-praised apocalyptic black comedy of alien infiltration and societal collapse) and Corrupting Dr. Nice (1997, a superb screwball romance of time travel and intellectual anachronism).
His brilliant short fiction, which is frequently nominated for awards and included in Year's Best anthologies, is collected in Meeting in Infinity (1992) and The Pure Product (1997).
I interviewed John Kessel by e-mail in May and June of 2003.
How were you first attracted to SF? Which SF authors did you particularly admire early on, and which of them influenced you most profoundly?
Kessel: It seems to me that I always liked the fantastic in stories, from fairy tales to Dr. Seuss. I don't remember anyone introducing me to SF as such, though my father was a reader of popular fiction. By the late 1950s, before I was 10 years old, I regularly checked SF books out of the public library: Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein, Groff Conklin anthologies, Healey & McComas' best of the year, Merril's best SF anthologies, the Winston series of SF juveniles. I read Verne, Wells, Stapledon and Huxley and Orwell in junior high and high school. I would seek out books that resembled SF, by writers who didn't write it—Brave New World, Twain's A Connecticut Yankee. About 1962, I discovered paperback books, and SF magazines slightly after that. I was a big fan of Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke (I read pretty much everything the three of them had written up to about 1970). But also the "anti-Campbell" SF of the 1950s: Bester, Edgar Pangborn, Pohl & Kornbluth, Knight, Leiber. I read H.L. Gold's anthologies from Galaxy.
Among my favorite books were de Camp and Pratt's The Incomplete Enchanter and The Castle of Iron, but by and large I did not read fantasy, and there were some odd holes in my reading: Aside from "The Color Out of Space," I never read Lovecraft, and ignored the Edgar Rice Burroughs rediscovery of the early '60s. I never read Tolkien, even after the boom hit with the paperback reprints in the mid-'60s and everyone around me had a dog named Frodo.
Though I liked all sorts of SF, the writers who had the most lasting influence on me came a little later in my reading: Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula Le Guin. I loved short-story writers like C.M. Kornbluth and Damon Knight. I went through a big Samuel Delany phase in the late '60s. Then, when I was in my 20s, I was greatly influenced by Thomas Disch, Gene Wolfe, Kate Wilhelm and Joanna Russ.
Your work clearly evidences a wide range of influences from beyond SF, literary, cinematic, historical, philosophical. What have your chief non-science-fictional inspirations been?
Kessel: I read the usual literature in junior high and high school: Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain. But really, I was a latecomer to the study of literature. For instance, I didn't read Huck Finn until I was a freshman in college. Neither of my parents finished high school, and the only books we had around the house were the ones I bought or checked out of the library, plus a couple of old "best sellers" from the '40s like Captain from Castile and Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge.
Once I got into college lit classes, I lost my prejudice against non-SF and became an enthusiast of various writers: Sterne, Conrad, Nathanael West, Jane Austen, E.M. Forster. Specific novels I remember being completely knocked out by: Wuthering Heights, A Passage to India, The Secret Agent, The Day of the Locust.
I also discovered canonical writers I didn't like—Lawrence, late Joyce, Bellow, Updike, Henry James, John Barth, William Gass. I was always trying to "place myself" between these writers.
And of course, Melville is probably the most significant influence on me from canonical literature. I read Moby Dick my sophomore year in college, and struggled with it. Then I read it again in grad school, when I took a seminar in Hawthorne and Melville at the University of Kansas under the internationally known Melville scholar Elizabeth Schultz. What a teacher, what a course! I really got the Melville bug then. Melville appears in a lot of my work, especially in the decade of 1980-90.
What I like about Melville is the way he "dives deep" into metaphysical issues. How he takes the forms of popular fiction, like the sea story, and uses them to explore questions of the nature of reality and humanity's place in the universe. He's an SF writer under the skin. Also, he is a tremendously tricky constructor of narratives.
And funny! A very subtle, dark humor. Good News From Outer Space was directly inspired by Melville's The Confidence Man, one of the darkest comic novels ever written.
From childhood I was also a big movie fan. I loved old SF films like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet; I would go to double features in the late '50s/early '60s at the Abbot Theater in Buffalo, N.Y. But I also liked non-SF movies. I saw Citizen Kane on the late show when I was 14 or 15 and was very moved. I loved the Marx Brothers. When I was in college I discovered screwball comedies of the '30s: Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, Twentieth Century, His Girl Friday, Pat and Mike, etc. Somehow I missed Preston Sturges until much later. I also loved film noir and the hard-boiled detective stories of Hammett and Chandler. From my college days I have sought out old films and read lots of film criticism.
In nonfiction, my studying physics gave me an outsider's view of literature. And I read a lot of existential philosophy in college and Taoist philosophy and Zen Buddhism in grad school.
Your recent short story in Fantasy & Science Fiction, "Of New Arrivals, Many Johns, and the Music of the Spheres," is an amusing reflection on the continuing divide between genre fiction, such as SF, and elite "mainstream" literature. How inevitable, in your opinion, is this schism, and how successfully can it be bridged?
Kessel: I used to think the distinction was artificial, and was maintained only because culturally enforced. From 1970-1985, if you could say I had a project as a writer, it was to write SF like mainstream fiction. I didn't see the inherent quality of the difference until the 1980s, when Bruce Sterling challenged my assumptions. From 1985 on my project has been to understand the differences between mainstream and SF and to make my SF fully SF while not abandoning awareness of literary qualities. I want to explore the difference, coming as close to the border, from the SF side, as I can without passing over into mainstream.
I still think there is a huge cultural element in the division between the readerships of SF and mainstream literature. At times I rail against this, and get depressed when I meet intelligent readers of mainstream fiction who can't be bothered to try SF, or when they do find some SF that they consider good, claim that it's not SF. I can't tell you how many times in the last 25 years I've had academic friends say things about my writing that they intend as compliments but that come across as slights because they just don't read SF. I don't react to this anymore.
I do think that there's a generation of new writers coming along for whom the barrier between genre and mainstream is permeable, maybe even invisible. More concerning them later. ...
In your first years as a published writer, you collaborated quite extensively with James Patrick Kelly, teamwork culminating in the novel Freedom Beach. How did this collaboration start? What were the respective strengths you and Kelly brought to the partnership?
Kessel: The collaboration started as a friendship, and in my admiration of his work. We met at the world SF con in Boston in 1980. In the early '80s, when we were both trying to establish ourselves, we would exchange manuscripts. I critiqued the manuscript of Jim's first novel, Planet of Whispers. About 1982, when I finished my dissertation in fiction writing at the University of Kansas, I was in a writing slump and asked Jim if he had any stalled manuscripts he might consider sending me to work on as collaborations. He sent me a story that eventually became "Friend."
He also sent me the idea and first page of "Freedom Beach" (the story version), which I continued until we had most of the first draft. It was Jim's idea to add related stories and write interstitial chapters to make this into a novel.
I would say that our respective strengths at that time were these: Kelly wrote cleaner prose. He had a better grasp of story structure. His writing was much less self-conscious, and showed much less straining for effect. He engaged more directly with the characters, while I was always sliding off into consideration of the abstract meanings behind the action. Jim invented the structure of Freedom Beach, and wrote the four "contemporary" chapters. He knew how to shape a novel. It's funny to me that Jim is typecast as a short story writer, when at least at that time he knew much more about novel writing than I did.
My strengths—if you want to call them strengths; they could be seen as weaknesses by some: ... A desire and ability to wring the philosophical implications out of a story situation, to the point of writing parables. I love paradox, and greatly enjoy turning an idea one way, then reversing it in the same story. I am always concerned with moral issues. I love to embed literary and cultural references. I have a sense of humor and satire. And I have a certain savagery—one of the nicest things any reviewer has ever said about me was when John Clute, in a review of my first story collection, said, "Kessel is an astonishingly savage writer."
Your career emphasis has fallen on short fiction. Why is this? Is it in short stories and novellas that SF's greatest creative vitality is to be found?
Kessel: I love short stories. I've always loved them. The form of the short story does not seem to me to be less important than the novel, but different. Plus, I think I am a natural short-story writer. This is not to denigrate novels: A novel can build overwhelming force, like a steamroller, like weather. A short story is like a sock on the jaw, or a sudden moment in the storm.
At one time, I would have said that there were more perfect SF short stories than novels, but I think the genre has been gaining ground rapidly in the novel in the last 30 years. I don't think SF has anything to be ashamed of in either form. I guess a lot of innovations, and new subject matter, tend to come into the genre at the short lengths first; I would hate to see the genre become exclusively a novel-based form. There is nothing like a great short story, from Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit" to Fowler's "Game Night at the Fox and Goose."
Your three novels to date have, in fact, been assembled from short stories, or developed through them. Why this mosaic approach? What are its particular challenges?
Kessel: Freedom Beach is a "fix-up," assembled from short stories. But I'd contest that the other two are. Yes, three of the 39 chapters of Good News appeared as stories, but I wrote them originally as chapters of the novel. I always knew I was writing a novel, and set up the structure so I could excerpt these chapters and not disappear from before the SF public for the three to four years it took me to finish the first draft.
Dr. Nice contains no short stories, though I did write two stories set in the "moment universe" setup before I finished the book. In that case, I had started the novel and gotten stuck. I decided to try out a couple of stories (the "Detlev Gruber" stories) to see if the time-travel background was viable, and what I could do with it. I had done all this conceptual work and didn't want it to go to waste. But they were always meant to be separate stories. And the novel was always meant to be a novel, completely separate from the stories.
That said, I discovered that this method works for me. My recent "Society of Cousins" stories grew out of a ton of background work I did for a novel, Soft Upset, that I started and never got past the beginning. Right now it doesn't look like I'll ever write the novel, and the story cycle is engaging. I find the form interesting, and liberating. I don't intend to "fix up" these stories, but I do intend to write several others and I hope they will eventually become a book.
Being a university academic, you write fiction sparely, deliberately; your volume of published work isn't huge, but is of a very high, very considered, standard. How much synergy is there between your teaching, your scholarly analysis, and your active creation, of literature?
Kessel: My life is teaching literature classes, and increasingly teaching writing. As such, I am always reading works that I intend to teach, and reading manuscripts of student work. I often get ideas from reading classic lit, or discussing story issues with writing students. I'm not much of a scholar (I've only published three pieces of scholarship, one essay each on E.M. Forster and John Collier, and a forthcoming essay on Orson Scott Card), but I am always analyzing books in order to teach them, and this has been tremendously helpful. I learn a lot from having to think about how to explain how works of lit function to my students. I think about literature from the perspective of a writer. To me, Joyce or Conrad or Bester or Lethem are all writing together. E.M. Forster suggested in his Aspects of the Novel that we should visualize writers, not as being ancestors or descendants of each other, but as all sitting in the same room writing at the same time. Nowadays, when we are all so aware of the historical and cultural contexts out of which writers work, this is a very unfashionable view.
I don't deny the cultural influences and contexts of writers, but if you concentrate too much on that you may not be aware of how much you may be able to steal from a classic writer. I am all for theft.
Your second novel, Good News From Outer Space, is a marvelous existential comedy, hilarious and biting at once. How would you sum up your particular variety of wit, its techniques and purpose? I think of dadaist punks in Good News breaking into cars and installing new sound systems in them, of an Uncle Sam figure urging thugs to "Deconstruct me that man!" ...
Kessel: Absurdist comedy has always appealed to me, if I'm allowed to indulge some existential overtones. Good News is my cross between the Marx Brothers and Melville's The Confidence Man. SF is a wonderful vehicle for anything like this. Exaggeration, paradox, reversal: all find natural homes in SF backgrounds. I think the world is both hilarious and heartbreaking.
The aliens in Good News are an absent presence in the text, will-o'-the-wisp tricksters. To what extent are they simply the Greys of flying-saucer myth, psychoanalyzed and extrapolated?
Kessel: They were more consciously modeled on the trickster figure, the man of a dozen disguises, the central mysterious unknowable and even cosmic figure of The Confidence Man. The original title of Good News was Confidence. I wanted to examine and call into question all the possible things human beings have used to anchor their lives: love, money, science, political idealism, religion, god.
I did do a lot of flying-saucer research at the time, but the Greys as presented in contemporary UFO mythology strike me as being pretty boring. I'm much more interested in what aliens might reveal about human beings.
Your third novel, Corrupting Dr. Nice, is a romantic time-travel farce patterned after the '30s and '40s screwball comedies of Preston Sturges and others. Humor again: What is it you find so compelling, and so creatively stimulating, about the screwball formula?
Kessel: First and most basically, these stories make me laugh. Second, I love the by-play between the men and women. I especially love the women characters: all the women in classic screwball comedies are a step ahead of the men. They are smart, sexy, worldly wise, morally flexible and incredibly witty. Even when they seem completely scatterbrained (Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey), they are still in some human way wiser than the men. They know about sex, how powerful it is, how that's what we're here for (and it's not about procreation).
And despite the rivalry between men and women, screwball comedies at their best strike me as presenting a marvelously egalitarian, even utopian, vision of relations between the sexes.
Corrupting Dr. Nice and attendant stories such as "The Pure Product" have a decidedly serious side, too, embodying some dark satire on capitalism. Are the conventions of the time travel subgenre especially well tailored to satire of that kind?
Kessel: Time-travel stories of a certain sort are great vehicles for satire. Not the paradox stories, or the ones that are just about famous historical figures. Stories should do something with those figures. They have to know enough real history to use that history against the present. For instance, in Dr. Nice, at some point in thinking about time travel to the past, I realized I had a perfect metaphor for First World exploitation of the Third World. The greater the enormity of the exploitation, the greater the satire of Western economic imperialism. So I set my banal tourist trap in the Holy Land at the time of Christ. And, if we did have that technology in a capitalist system, I have no doubt we would use it the way they do in the story.
Corrupting Dr. Nice effectively, and fairly audaciously, analyzes religious sensibilities: Christ is a significant secondary character, and first century Palestine a major setting. What are you most centrally assessing here: the literal actuality of 2,000 years ago, or how present-day human beings filter history mentally, editing it for contemporary relevance?
Kessel: I grew up in the Catholic church, and learned all the dogma of the church. But only as an adult and a lapsed Catholic did I begin to think about who Jesus, or Jeshu, might be. I think Christianity is, as you say, all about "filtering history mentally, editing it for contemporary relevance." Hell, that was what Saint Paul was already doing in his epistles, a decade after Jeshu was crucified. The history of Christianity is the history of the intellectual and emotional struggle over the possession and interpretation of Jeshu. Who owns Jesus? Who gets to say who he was? Who gets to say what he said? Who gets to say what he meant by what he said?
You've already mentioned your current book-length project, the cycle of "Society of Cousins" tales set in a future feminist utopia on the moon. So far, three stories, "The Juniper Tree," "Stories for Men" and "Under the Lunchbox Tree" (the first published in Science Fiction Age, the other two in Asimov's), share this venue. What has stimulated your particular interest in the controversies of gender politics, and what conclusions are you drawing through these new fictions of yours? Is utopia a practically feasible concept?
Kessel: I've been interested in gender politics for 30 years or more. I came of age at the time of the resurgent feminism of the late '60s and early '70s, and so I couldn't avoid some of the issues. My relationships with women—my wife, Sue Hall, my friends like Karen Fowler and Pat Murphy and Maureen McHugh and others—have caused me to think about these things. But I guess the immediate impulse to begin writing this story cycle has been the birth and development of my daughter Emma. She was born in 1994, and ever since she was in daycare I've been fascinated by watching her, and noting differences between girls and boys.
I don't know if I believe utopia is practically feasible. It depends on what you mean by utopia. If by utopia you mean a society where everyone acts with perfect morality or ethics, then we will never have one. But I certainly think that we can organize society much better than we do now. I think beneficial change is possible, and an egalitarian relationship between the sexes is possible. But even if we get there, there's no guarantee we will stay there. There's no "home free" in human life. Just as with democracy, "the price of utopia is eternal vigilance."
As a teacher of creative writing, you've helped shape some of SF's newer talents, such as the remarkable Andy Duncan. Are you impressed with the caliber of the currently rising generation of writers? And how would you sum up the present health of written SF as a whole?
Kessel: I think more excellent writing is being done in SF today than ever before. I feel terribly ignorant of too much of it. When I was 15, I had a fairly complete knowledge of SF, its history and contemporary examples. There were few writers whom I had not read. Today there are hundreds I haven't read, and dozens of major writers of whose work I have not read one word.
I am very impressed with the new writers. For one thing, they have an ease with the boundaries of genre that I don't have, despite my spending years in universities, and being a lit teacher. A writer like Andy is much more versatile than I. Jonathan Lethem or Alex Irvine pass without distress over the border between genre and mainstream in ways I can't. I feel like a crude lungfish in comparison with their amphibian nature. I gasp and struggle to exist in the air of mainstream, and the effort is evident, and grace is not.
I feel like the last of the Campbell-era writers. I grew up knowing SF as a coherent field, a branch of pulp genre fiction based in the magazines. I have more in common with those warhorse writers of the '40s and '50s than I do with the young writers of the '90s.
Not that I'm done yet, but I'm who I am, and can't be something that I am not. I'm damn proud of who I am, actually. I don't know if I can compete evolutionarily with those amphibians and the mammals to come, but I'm a crusty, large, strong lungfish, and I hope to survive the destruction of my original ecological niche.
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