ack Dann, born in 1945, has been a significant creative and editorial force in American SF and fantasy since 1970, when his first short stories were published.
His novels to date are Starhiker (1977), Junction (1981), The Man Who Melted (1984) and High Steel (1993, with Jack C. Haldeman II), all SF, and, later, The Memory Cathedral: A Secret History of Leonardo da Vinci (1995), The Silent (1998), Counting Coup (Australia 2000, USA 2001), and this year's The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean. These last four books are all historical or approximately contemporary in setting.
His collections are Timetipping (1980), Jubilee (Australia 2001, USA 2002) and Visitations (2003). As an editor, he has been individually or jointly responsible for numerous important genre anthologies, including Wandering Stars (1974), More Wandering Stars (1981), In the Field of Fire (1987), Dreaming Down-Under (2000) and Gathering the Bones (2003). Dann currently lives in Australia.
Science Fiction Weekly interviewed Jack Dann in May/June of 2004, not long before the release of his exceptional alternate-history novel, The Rebel.
Almost inevitably, we start with the biographical question: How were you originally drawn to SF, and how did your active involvement in the writing life of the genre come about?
Dann: In a sense, I truly grew up with SF, as my father was a reader and his collection lined the walls of my bedroom. I can remember gazing at the colorful covers before I could read, and as I learned to read, the collection had of course grown. The first SF novel I read was Festus Pragnell's The Green Man of Graypek, an early SF novel; and the reason I read it first was because I had been entranced by the Hannes Bok cover as a child. So the idea of genre novels and stories was in my mind from the get-go, a familiar part of the world of literature that I was exploring.
The first frisson happened when I met George Zebrowski and Pamela Sargent at SUNY Binghamton, which has renamed itself Binghamton University. That was in the late '60s. George had extraordinary ambition and was determined to be a writer ... a science-fiction writer. George and I started collaborating on short stories, which we sold. And Pamela started writing stories after that, although she had sold her first story when she was 17. George introduced me to the world of fandom and conventions, and we joined the Science Fiction Writers of America.
It was at a Nebula Awards ceremony that I met Gardner Dozois, who thought I was a "greaser" in a leather jacket, which, alas, I suppose I was. Gardner and I became friends, and he took me along to the Guilford Workshop that took place at Jack C. Haldeman II's home—actually a mansion, as I recall—in the Guilford section of Baltimore. There I met Jack and his brother Joe W. Haldeman, George Alec Effinger (known as Piglet), Ted White, Tom Monteleone, Robert Thurston and William Nabors. Although he didn't attend the workshop sessions, Roger Zelazny was the unofficial patron, and did attend the parties. The Guilfords went on for a few years, and then moved to Philadelphia. The workshop became known as Philfords (all this in homage to Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm's Milford Workshops), and participants included Dozois, Susan Casper, Michael Swanwick, Tom Purdom, Samuel R. Delany, John Ford, Gregory Frost and David Hartwell.
Those workshops, and that also includes a Milford Workshop in Michigan, had a profound effect on my work, the kind of work I would produce, and the kind of writer and person I would become. A number of the participants became family, and we workshopped, brainstormed, collaborated and partied through the hot, electric salad days of our youth, a time when we imagined we could do anything, write all the great American novels combined, and live forever. I look back on those times with great nostalgia and affection.
Your early work shows the influence of the New Wave, the broad movement in '60s and '70s
SF toward experimental radicalism and political awareness. Looking back on the New Wave now,
how do you evaluate it? What were its primary successes and failures?
Dann: Yes, I came in on the tail end of the New Wave, and, in fact, I was selling my early solo stories to Michael Moorcock's New Worlds in England before I was publishing in the U.S. I was interested in the broader literature, and I remember that in the '70s I was influenced by Decadent writers such as Huysmans (the influence can be seen in stories such as "Windows") and the Expressionists. Regarding the New Wave movement, as a movement, I think it had a great impact on SF and fantasy.
It was a time when everything seemed to be opening up, political and social movements were changing the way we interacted with each other; it was a coming-of-age period in the U.S., and my generation was involved in the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the anti-war movement, and on and on. During the New Wave, women became a central focus in the genre, and the claim could probably be made that they were doing the most interesting work—Alice Sheldon, Carol Emshwiller, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kit Reed, Pamela Sargent, Kate Wilhelm, Joanna Russ, Sonya Dorman. So literary experimentation became very important, and there was much wonderful work.
Where did it fail? Well, like all movements, it became assimilated into the literature, but I suppose it could be said that far too much of the "experimentation" was reworking what had already been done years before by "mainstream" writers such as Dos Passos. But at the top of its form, the New Wave was spectacular, and here I think of Ballard's compressed novels, and Brian Aldiss at his most experimental.
You're a Jewish writer, and Judaism plays a central role in a number of your stories, as well as constituting the theme of your Wandering Stars anthologies. Is SF especially well equipped to deal with the nature and concerns of Judaism?
Dann: Like Isaac Asimov, who wrote the introduction to Wandering Stars and More Wandering Stars, I am a cultural Jew rather than a practicing Jew. I am, in fact, an atheist, or, at best—on very optimistic days—an agnostic. Yet, as Isaac said, "It doesn't matter. I'm Jewish enough." I believe strongly in the idea of testifying ... of not allowing the Holocaust to be forgotten, and there is a stream of my work, my fiction, that shows that concern: stories such as "Camps," "Kaddish," "Tea" and "Jumping the Road." I have always thought that SF, magical realism and fantasy can provide different and important perspectives.
It has been said that the Holocaust was so terrible, so far on the edges of comprehension, so surreal that fiction cannot hope to depict it. That is probably true, but I believe that in the right hands, the tools of fabulation can shout some light into the dark and demonic.
Throughout your career you've collaborated on stories, with such fellow authors and friends as George Zebrowski (as mentioned earlier), Michael Swanwick and Gardner Dozois. The results have
often been spectacular. What do you see as the especial rewards (and pitfalls, if any) of creative
collaboration?
Dann: I'm right now putting together a collection called The Fiction Factory for Golden Gryphon Press—it is a collection of my collaborative stories. Collaboration is a very tricky subject, for me, at least, because it seems to be different for every collaborative team. In some collaborations, I do what I consider editing, i.e., the second cut, and somehow, while I'm editing, I find myself writing thousands of words of "transitional text." In other collaborations, we sat at the computer (or, in those days, the typewriter) and I would write a few pages, and my collaborator would write a few pages, and back and forth it would go. I remember visiting Jack C. Haldeman II in Florida. He brought out a bottle of Drambuie, told me I had to sit down and write scenes for our novel High Steel, and we spent days typing away. I would work until I
became tired, then he would take over, and back and forth it went. Jay (as he was known to his friends) was a scientist, and as we were writing, I realized that I was writing the science and technological stuff, and he was doing the literary pyrotechnics. I mentioned that there was something awry here, but his response was to fill up my glass with the amber liquid.
With Barry Malzberg, I feel like an editor. I come up with an idea, he has a story back to me in just about the time it would take me to eat a quick lunch. Then I rework for weeks. With George Zebrowski, we would discuss ideas, and pass the work back and forth. There was a grand time in the '80s when Gardner Dozois, Michael Swanwick, Susan Casper and I were madly collaborating. This period was a wonderful mix, or synergy, to talk in corporate-ese. We were selling everything we were writing to the slicks for very good money—to Playboy, Penthouse, Omni and the like. As a joke, we called ourselves The Fiction Factory.
I think that Gardner was the glue that held these collaborations together. He was the editor, and so we were all OK with him doing the last, conforming draft. I think of those times as pure electricity; we were young, those were our salad days, and it felt like we could do no wrong. I have been told that I was often the engine that got the stories started, as I would sit down and just turn out the pages, until I got stuck; and then, miraculously, Gardner and Michael and Susan would magic it into a full-blown story. The stories would get passed around. I would do interstitial stuff, or write scenes where I (supposedly) had expertise, and so the stories flowed. Ideas were everywhere. In Gardner's notebooks, in casual remarks, in dreams of friends—we "borrowed" Tess Kissinger's dream of being taken to the senior prom by Jesus and turned it into "Slow Dancing With Jesus." Ah, I am still wistful for those days, although I just finished a
collaboration with Barry Malzberg, and, hallelujah, I still feel the juice!
So, all of that is the joys, the rewards. The pitfalls? I believe that in a good collaboration, the authors bring their strengths to the story; one author's strength cancels the other author's weakness, and back and forth it goes. Of course, the pitfall is when the authors' weaknesses in either style or storytelling or both overwhelm the authors' strengths. I can't judge my own collaborations. That is for others to do.
Of course, you're well known as an editor of anthologies, often (again) in partnership with Gardner Dozois. How large a proportion of your time now goes into editing?
Dann: A bad time to ask that just now, as I am editing the Nebula Awards anthology, and it is very time-consuming, because aside from reprinting stories, I am commissioning original essays, and I feel as if I'm being buried in scutwork. But that's the name of the game, I suppose, and I shouldn't complain. We edit the Nebula volumes out of love, because it is a good thing to do; and, in fact, most editing is like that. It certainly was the case for doing Dreaming Down-Under and Gathering the Bones—those were anthologies I felt could make a difference, and perhaps they have. I love editing, as does Gardner; and, in fact, the first book I sold was an anthology: It was Wandering Stars. Gardner and I have edited a lot of books together, notably the Magic Tales anthologies for Penguin. It still grinds us a bit that this series of anthologies, which defines the archetypical SF and fantasy themes, has not been taken as seriously as it might. Most of my time is spent writing and researching my novels; but I can't help myself: I love editing anthologies. I love the joy of finding new writers and wonderful work. And, somehow, editing a good anthology feels like writing.
Of all the world's editors and novelists, you seem to have the longest commute: Australia to New York, and back again. When and why did you settle in Australia, and how many times a year do you make the long pilgrimage across the globe?
Dann: Ah, so you think a mere 10,000 miles is a long commute ... I can tell you that when I'm stuck in cattle class on Qantas for some 14 hours, it does start to feel a bit, er, long. But like everyone who does the long hauls, I've developed strategies to make it as palatable as it can be—sleep a lot, enjoy time out of time where there are no phone calls, no e-mail, nothing to do but watch movies, read, dream, think, and, did I say, sleep?
I live on a farm overlooking the sea and also have an apartment in Melbourne. Melbourne, especially the section where we live, reminds me of Paris ... and San Francisco. It's a cafe culture. I love living here, being in the city and the country, which is breathtakingly beautiful, like the bits of New Zealand seen in the Lord of the Rings films. I love being out of my culture, being a stranger everywhere, yet, somehow, feeling at home, feeling comfortable in a culture that is not my own. (Although Australian and American cultures seem to be very similar, they really aren't; once I'd lived here for a year, I realized that the cultures could
be compared to a pyramid—they seemed alike at the top, at the point, but their bases were very different indeed.)
In a nutshell. I met my partner, writer and critic Janeen Webb, at a convention in San Francisco. She's Australian. Within three months I'd moved country. Never a regret. I found culture shock rejuvenating!
Ah, yes, the commute. I go back to L.A. and New York, specifically, at least once a year. There have been years when I've been back and forth four times (I need a chiropractor after that!)
Over the last decade, the emphasis of your writing appears to have shifted dramatically, from SF to novels, and pendant stories, dealing with contemporary and historical experience, although with elements of the speculative and fantastic still very much in place. Why this evolution?
Dann: For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I'm surprised where the journey takes me. I began my career writing SF and fantasy, and, looking back now, it seems to have been quite a natural evolution from SF to historical and contemporary fiction. I've been writing across the genres—and out of the genres—for quite a while now. I believe that the "tools" I've acquired from writing in genre have given me an edge in writing contemporary and historical novels. Certainly depicting the Renaissance mindset as alien in The Memory Cathedral is science fictional in thrust, and I used genre techniques in The Silent, as my protagonist, Mundy McDowell, constructs a new reality to cope with the terrible reality he can't quite face.
For me, the real and the fabulous blur in my fiction, as they seem to have done in my life. My next novel (I think!) will be about a murder in a military school. This probably won't have any fantastic elements at all, yet it is a novel that I've had in mind to write for 30 years, so this isn't exactly a new idea. I love the genres, and use the tropes and techniques for whatever I'm interested in writing. Those interests change as I do.
The first of your historical fantasias was The Memory Cathedral: a long, densely written "Secret History" of Leonardo da Vinci's activities as artist, lover, courtier, and, above all, military engineer. What brought about your particular fascination with Leonardo, and with Renaissance conceptions of memory?
Dann: The theme of time and memory works its way through most of my work, and it was a bit of serendipity that brought me to Leonardo and the idea of the memory cathedral, or memory palace, which is a mnemonic system of memorization, the history of which dates back to Simonides of Ceos. As I wrote in the afterword to the book, the idea for The Memory Cathedral began in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. I was relaxing and enjoying reading Antonina Vallentin's 1938 biography of Leonardo da Vinci when I suddenly saw in my mind's eye a squadron of high-Gothic-looking airplanes flying over Renaissance Florence; in fact, I saw the scene as if it were taking place in Giorgio Vasari's painting of Florence. I saw the planes passing over the Duomo, saw them reflected in the mirror of the Arno River that wound its way through Florence in Vasari's painting; and I knew, I knew then that I had to bring that image to life.
It took me six years of writing and research to achieve that, and, as you probably know, the image itself became transmogrified into something else. Alas, Leonardo's aircraft doesn't fly over the Arno in The Memory Cathedral ... but over the desert. Books are living things and often determine where and when things will happen. Regarding the Renaissance conceptions of memory that inform the overarching theme and architecture of the book, I read Jonathan D. Spence's fine The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, and from there researched the memory systems of Giulio Camillo, Giordano Bruno and Robert Fludd. My fascination with memory became ever more focused ...
Talking counterfactually now: Do you think Leonardo's inventions could—as in your related novella "Da Vinci Rising"—in fact have sparked an Industrial Revolution of sorts centuries before the actual one?
Dann: Yes, I do believe they might have. The Memory Cathedral is secret history, in that it takes place between the cracks of known history, while "Da Vinci Rising" is true alternate history. Leonardo's greatest wish was that his notebooks be kept together, published as of a piece; and his servant and companion, the nobleman Francesco Melzi, had promised to take care of Leonardo's papers after his death. But that didn't happen, and Leonardo's papers were scattered, and many destroyed. He had detailed drawings for what looks to be a Gatling gun. What if that one invention had been lifted from his notebook ... ? For good or ill, the world probably would have been a different place and history changed.
Your subsequent novel, The Silent, considers the horrors of the U.S. Civil War quite graphically. Why did you choose a teenage boy—the aforementioned Mundy McDowell—as your protagonist here?
Dann: The Silent is basically a coming-of-age novel, and I wanted to show what war was really like, what it felt like, smelled like—I wanted an "everyman" protagonist to experience what have now become great moments of history, and to do that I needed an ordinary point-of-view character, rather than one of the great generals of the war. There has been more than enough fiction written from the perspective of the great generals. I wanted to write a novel of the citizen's war, and that citizen was 13-year-old Mundy McDowell, who is so shocked by what he witnesses in the first chapter of the novel that he creates his own meta-reality in order to cope with the horrors of war.
Your road novel, Counting Coup (aka Bad Medicine), is an impressive account of two men approaching old age: their determined efforts to experience as much as possible, to count coup on life, before death approaches. How much of their often wild narrative reflects personal experiences of yours? The Native American sweat lodges and shamanistic rituals, for example?
Dann: Ah, this is the question that could get me into trouble. I will admit that Counting Coup does contain a lot of my own experience, experiences from my, shall we say, salad days. When I was researching this novel, I ceremonied with Sioux people, and all I will say is that some of the most fantastical bits in the novel are true, or were true as I experienced them. Yes, in a very real sense, there was an eagle in the sweat lodge.
You've been a moderately prolific short story writer for a long time; in recent years, major collections of your stories, Jubilee and Visitations, have been published, with at least one more to come ...
Dann: I love the short story, novelette and novella forms. I envisioned Jubilee to be my big, retrospective collection, and then I was asked to do another collection, which became Visitations. If you combine Jubilee and Visitations with my 1980 collection Timetipping, you'll have a good portion of my short fiction oeuvre. I hope to collect my more recent work in future. And, of course, The Fiction Factory will be a retrospective collection of my collaborations, although it will not contain all of them.
Your major new novel, The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean, is a startling and intimate alternate history, beginning with the premise of Dean surviving his in fact fatal car crash in 1955. Why did you choose Dean as your Hollywood icon to be gifted with a second chance at life?
Dann: I worked with Nick Ray, who directed Rebel Without a Cause. When I was an adolescent, James Dean was a major role model ... as was Elvis Presley, who is a main character in the novel. I wanted to write a sort of grand autobiography of the '50s and '60s, and my way in was James Dean. In a way I was trying to write the personal dream and the larger cultural dream.
The relationship, physical and spiritual, which dominates The Rebel is one between Jimmy Dean and Marilyn Monroe. Were they in fact acquainted at all? And, granting the concept of their love/friendship extending beyond 1955, what do you think would have constituted its especial appropriateness, its chemistry?
Dann: Jimmy and Marilyn knew each other, but not well. They both were members of Lee Strasberg's Actors' Studio in New York, both studied "The Method." They had met at a screening of On the Waterfront, and, according to Shelley Winters, didn't like one another at all. (I have my own beef with Shelley Winters, as she once threw my brand new Italian loafers overboard; but that's a long story.) Marilyn later was a celebrity usher at the premiere of East of Eden ... but Jimmy decided not to attend the opening, even though he was a major star.
When I was doing the research for The Rebel, I came upon a number of biographies of Marilyn Monroe, and I was struck by how much alike she and Jimmy were. They were both light bulbs—Jimmy and Marilyn have been described as being ordinary-looking people, who would pass unnoticed in a crowd, until they turned on the "light bulb." Then they were charisma itself—beautiful, sleek, numenal. They both lived on the edge, were risk takers, drug users; they were both self-absorbed and wanted desperately to better themselves intellectually. And they both were desperate to be loved, yet neither could sustain relationships. I can't help but see them as soulmates, and that is what they become in The Rebel.
There's a lot of extended, fraught dialogue in The Rebel, between Jimmy Dean and Marilyn, and also between Dean and various others: Pier Angeli, Elvis Presley, Bobby Kennedy, etc. Why did you choose to format so much of the novel this way?
Dann: I used H.G. Wells's technique of changing only one thing—Jimmy lives. I tried to make everything else as authentic as possible, as if I were writing biography. I trained in The Method, and I apply that technique to writing. I need to know everything I can about characters and places. I immerse myself in the history and the people, and the result is how I believe they would talk to each other, interact with each other. For me as I wrote this book, the people and places were real. The conversations were what the author overheard.
Your portrait of Bobby Kennedy in The Rebel is fascinating: implicit in all the sexual and political intrigues he initiates, there's a sustained interrogation of the morality of power, especially of power allied with a possibly opportunistic idealism. How do you view the Kennedys, their achievements in life and their political legacy?
Dann: I believe that James Dean and Bobby Kennedy had similar personalities and much in common. They were both womanizers, overachievers and risk takers, fascinated and obsessed by danger and death, and always trying to prove their courage. Bobby Kennedy marked the following sentence from Emerson's essays: "Always do what you are afraid to do"—Dean might have marked the same passage. My portrait of the Kennedys in The Rebel is the way I see them, and as I depict Jimmy's journey to social and political awareness, I also depict Bobby's. For JFK, civil rights and the plight of blacks were political expediencies, but Bobby, born to great privilege and power, actually got out and saw firsthand the plight of the poor and disadvantaged, and in one of those great and wonderful historical ironies, RFK became their voice ... their hope. In our own stream of history, although JFK spoke eloquently of a great social restructure, it was his successor, the congressional insider Lyndon Johnson, who actually got the legislation through.
In The Rebel, Jimmy Dean becomes prominent in Californian and national politics. How bold do you think your supposition is that he would have moved in that direction? Could he have made any real difference to the outcome of events like the anti-Vietnam War protests, the civil rights struggle?
Dann: I should mention that when I started working out how James Dean could beat Ronald Reagan in a gubernatorial election, I was worried that readers might consider this idea too far-fetched; and so I worked very hard to make sure that my details were right. I was in touch with the California board of elections to make sure I got the law right ... all this before Arnold Schwarzenegger decided to run for governor of California. I suppose the old adage is true: Truth is stranger than fiction.
But to your question whether Jimmy could have made a difference. The Rebel is an exploration of the nature of fame and icons, and from what I have seen, we attribute all sorts of expertise to famous people, people who are famous for a particular ability, or who are famous for being famous. How did Reagan become president of the United States? How did Schwarzenegger become governor of California? And the talk in the financial papers is that Schwarzenegger is doing a good job.
Nah, that's too far-fetched. Nobody would ever believe it ...
There are various short stories spinning off from The Rebel. What are their titles, and is there a chance of their being collected, as a companion volume to The Rebel?
Dann: And I thought that was my little secret. So far the spinoff stories and short novels are "Ting-a-Ling" (Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction), "Rings Around the Moon" (Polyphony 3), "Good Deeds" (Conqueror Fantastic), "Bugs" (Postscripts 2), "Dharma Bums" (to be published in Argosy), "Dreaming With the Angels" (to be published in Best Ever Australian SF), and as yet unpublished are "The Method," "King of the Mountain" and "Promised Land." I have considered the possibility of a companion volume, but have not acted on it as yet.
As you mentioned earlier, your next novel is going to be Extra Duty, a mainstream account of a murder in a military school. Are any other projects on the horizon?
Dann: Well, I'm also considering a novel about Jack the Ripper as a biography of an artist. And a reworking of The Great Gatsby called Being Gatsby ... and an expansion of my novella "The Diamond Pit." I could go on and on, but, mercifully, I won't.
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