lexander C. Irvine, who sometimes goes by the less formal moniker Alex Irvine, is one of our finest new fantasists. His three novels to date, all acclaimed fantastic secret histories, are A Scattering of Jades (2002), One King, One Soldier (2004) and the especially impressive The Narrows, published by Del Rey in October 2005. Another recent title is the excellent, subtle long SF novella The Life of Riley, from Subterranean Press, which also issued Irvine's first major story collection, Unintended Consequences, in 2003.
Science Fiction Weekly interviewed Alex Irvine by e-mail in August 2005.
You're a very versatile writer, fluent across the entire range of SF, fantasy and horror; your early reading in these fields must have been extensive. How were you first introduced to speculative fiction, and which authors—genre and non-genre—have particularly influenced your work?
Irvine: I always read in the genre(s) and out of it (them), and my parents encouraged me because they were both readers. My early reading is probably pretty typical: My parents were both big Tolkien fans, and they put all the kids' classics in my hands. Two particular discoveries I remember pretty vividly. The first was when my mom came home from a garage sale or something with a big set of hardcover books done like the Ace Doubles, only these had, for example, Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson back-to-back, or Kidnapped and The Prince and the Pauper. I ripped through those, and read some of them dozens of times. For a while I was reading The Swiss Family Robinson practically to the exclusion of everything else. Then we moved into a new house, and the previous owners had left a shelf full of books in the attic. This was all SF and fantasy, and some great stuff. I was 11 years old, and one day just picked Dangerous Visions off this shelf, and once I got my head bent by that book, I dove into other stuff by those writers. So I was reading the New Wave before I'd ever really read Asimov or Bradbury or any of the older writers, and I still haven't got a very good feel for Golden Age SF. My experience with the genre pretty much begins with what was contemporary when I was a little kid.
The question of influences is a little more tricky, because some writers have become influential on me because I read and digested them when I was a kid, and so they conditioned what I thought books were and what I thought a writer might do (although I didn't start writing seriously until I was in my early 20s). Later influences are adopted more consciously, and with more effort. In the first category, I'd put the books mentioned above. Since I got more serious, at various times I've wanted to be Philip K. Dick, Salman Rushdie, Karen Joy Fowler, Richard Russo, Tim O'Brien, Harriette Arnow, Haruki Murakami, John Le Carré ... the list goes on. Ask me tomorrow and it would differ in some particulars, but I would never be sorry to include any of those people. Anything I've ever read, or seen in a movie, or heard on the radio (I get a lot of ideas from song lyrics) has been an influence to some degree.
You seem to have followed the classic path for a new SF writer: First you published a flurry of short stories in many different magazines and anthologies, then you proceeded to novels. Or did the writing of the novels actually come first?
Irvine: I started writing A Scattering of Jades in August of 1993, before I'd begun any of the stories that I would eventually publish. (Wait. I lied. I'd already written "Tato Chip, Tato Chip, Sing Me a Song.") It proceeded in fits and starts, partially because I went to grad school and partially because every so often I would discover that to write the book I wanted to write, I needed to do an awful lot of research, which I periodically dove into and didn't come back to the book until I felt like I could competently address, for example, how someone would have traveled from New York to Pittsburgh in 1843. While I was doing this, I was also working on short stories, and once I sold the first one, "Rossetti Song," to Fantasy & Science Fiction, I started to sell others pretty quickly. That laid the groundwork for me to sell A Scattering of Jades, but the book was by that time already written (actually, by November of 1998, when Gordon Van Gelder [on whose head be peace] bought "Rossetti Song," I'd already written Jades, One King, One Soldier; and The Life of Riley.)
Your short fiction is of exceptional range—period fantasy, interplanetary adventure, exotic cyberpunk, urban macabre, supernatural crime, near-future political allegory and much besides. Why this extraordinary variety of voices?
Irvine: I don't get just one kind of story idea, and each idea that comes along brings with it an initial idea of how it might be told. A couple of times I've read a story in a particular idiom that made me want to give that kind of story a try, as an experiment, but the truth is that it never occurred to me to write one kind of story all the time. I kind of admire people who write in a single milieu no matter what they're writing about, but on the principle that form is never more than an extension of content, I usually end up grubbing an idea from whatever source and trying to work out the best way to get that idea into a story that interests me. I like reading lots of different kinds of stories, so I write different kinds of stories.
Of your shorter works, my favorite is "Vandoise and the Bone Monster" (Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 2003). As an example of your writing technique: What inspired this story, and how did you conceive its remarkable nested narrative structure?
Irvine: That's one of my favorites, too. Well, a great-grandfather (or maybe it's great-great-) of mine was named Vandois Callison. He lived a fairly picaresque life as a traveling musician at odds with his family, and was a bigamist as well, and his story was in the front of my mind because at the time my mother—who has an ongoing if sporadic interest in genealogy—had just gotten in contact with some other relatives who knew what happened to Vandois at the end of his life. At the same time I was reading about the Bone Wars and the flowering of American paleontology after the Civil War, and I thought to myself that if I couldn't make a story out of competing paleontologists ginning up fraudulent fossils to make each other look bad in the scientific journals, then I was in the wrong business. Third, I was leaving Colorado myself, and went up to see the rock formation described in the story, and just like in the story, access to the site was being closed off, which combined with everything else going on at the time made me nostalgic. And fourth, I had just reread The Turn of the Screw and Frankenstein, and wanted to take a swing at a nested narrative that walks back out as slowly as it walks in; often those kinds of stories take their time getting you to the deepest part of the story, but then rip you back out fairly quickly. What if, I thought to myself, you could pace those steps back out the same way you paced the steps in? I'm sure lots of other people have done that, but I hadn't seen it.
Put all that together, and you get "Vandoise and the Bone Monster." I changed the spelling of my ancestor's name to make it clear that it shouldn't be pronounced as if it were French, but people always pronounce it Van-dwah anyway.
On to your novels: Although the three you've published to date differ from one another considerably in tone and symbolism, they are all historical fantasies, evoking past epochs with intense vividness. Why this particular fascination with the intersection of history and the fantastic? Has Tim Powers been an influence here?
Irvine: I'm not sure I have a good answer for this beyond saying that I'm interested in history, and I like to write stories of the fantastic, and because of this the two come together in my head a lot. Plus I've always been a sucker for a well-told conspiracy story, and the secret history obviously lends itself to shadowy and far-reaching plots, which are a lot of fun. Powers has been an influence to the extent that I've read and enjoyed his books, and he was one of my instructors at Clarion. When I was starting A Scattering of Jades, I was looking around for models of how to write a novel, since I'd never tried to write one before, and Tim's books seemed the most like what I had in mind. In the end, Jades ended up being more like a Tim Powers novel than maybe I'd intended. One King, One Soldier and The Narrows seem to me less like Powers novels, but the comparison keeps coming up. I don't mind it except when it functions as a sort of shorthand critical pigeonhole.
All of your novels center on American history, and all import an exotic mythological element—Aztec gods, the "Holy Grail," a Norman-French dwarf who induces disasters—into these home milieux. Are such supernatural intrusions from older cultures necessary to kick-start a mythology of America's own?
Irvine: No, I don't think so. In fact, I'm not sure I go along with the premise of the question, since America has long since assimilated various mythologies as it assimilated the peoples that brought those mythologies. Bugs Bunny is about as American as you can get, but—as maybe a hundred cultural critics have noted—he is Br'er Rabbit is Coyote is Anansi, and so on. America has a mythology that is every bit as slapdash and polyglot as the country itself, and all of the stuff I've borrowed from older cultures was in turn borrowed from still older cultures. The Aztecs borrowed from the Toltecs, who borrowed from the Olmecs; the Holy Grail has so many versions and antecedents that even James Frazer and Jessie Weston couldn't keep them straight ... you get the picture.
One reason I use these older cultures (and this has only become clear to me recently) is to explore immigrant experience, which I find fascinating but which is kind of distant to me because I don't have any close relatives who are recent immigrants. The Narrows is full of immigrant populations of various stripes, and One King is in some fundamental way about the migration of stories.
The protagonists of your novels tend to be quite ordinary people, swept up willy-nilly into perilous occult conspiracies and inspired to daring only by that very fundamental motivation, protection of their families. Do you think that true heroism, true heroic integrity, can only result from such very human considerations, rather than from more elevated Tolkienian notions of destiny and absolute virtue?
Irvine: Yes. There's no such thing as absolute virtue. Individual human beings either choose a virtuous path at a given moment, or they don't. Most of us do a little of both, and most of us never have to make that decision in particularly momentous ways. This is not to say that individual acts of heroism are consciously motivated by an articulated sense of virtue; what I mean to say is pretty nearly the opposite, that heroism results from a more primal impulse to protect what is dear to you: family, friends, comrades, loved ones.
And so to specific novels. Your first, A Scattering of Jades, is your funniest book—plenty of slapstick and farce amidst the urgencies of the plot. Is there something inherently absurd about the 19th-century gangs of New York (Scorsese's film notwithstanding), about Aaron Burr's Caesarist conspirings, about Tammany Hall politics, P.T. Barnum, et cetera?
Irvine: The history of that time seems to burst with outrageous characters, that's for sure. I mean, who's the closest living American kindred spirit to P.T. Barnum? There's no comparison. That kind of farcical admixture of larceny and grandiose self-promotion has been co-opted by televangelists lately. Plus maybe diet gurus and people like Dr. Phil. It's kind of regrettable; I mean, if you're going to get fleeced, you might as well have a good time doing it instead of being made to feel inferior.
Politically, though, we're seeing as high a percentage of schemers and idiots as we ever have. Aaron Burr's got nothing on the Project for a New American Century where crackpot schemes are concerned. The difference is that politicians are boring now, with all their edges sanded off by focus groups and the 24-hour news cycle, when before they had to be exciting if they wanted to get anywhere.
Much of A Scattering of Jades is set in the very real Mammoth Cave complex in Kentucky. How difficult is it to convert an actual setting like this into a fantastic fictional territory, so full of eerie symbolism and claustrophobic foreboding?
Irvine: When you're writing about Mammoth Cave, eeriness and foreboding are practically unavoidable. It is, as Stephen Bishop was apparently fond of saying, "a grand, gloomy, and peculiar place," and it lends itself to the kind of story I was telling. I had to reel myself back in when I started off on these tangents of landscape writing, because being in the cave is such a powerful experience and the surrounding is so unlike anywhere else I've ever been, but I didn't have to make any real effort to make the cave any stranger and more wonderful than it really is. I've been in every place described in the book except the bottom of Bottomless Pit and the River Styx, which is now closed to tourism because the presence of people apparently caused the cave fish all kinds of problems. I tried to get park officials to let me go down there for research purposes, but the cave is now a World Heritage Site, which means that "research for a novel" doesn't cut it as a reason anymore.
Your second novel, One King, One Soldier, brings a potent load of Old World myth to bear on post-World War II America: the Holy Grail, the lost fecundity of Osiris, the Fisher King. As John Clute has remarked, this seems to echo the themes of the Californian fantasy novels of James Blaylock and Tim Powers. ... Does America need a Fisher King, symbolically and actually?
Irvine: Who doesn't? I could use a Fisher King. The problem with this yearning for a messiah is that sometimes when you pick your messiah, you find that you've chosen poorly. This, as much as anything else, is the animating idea behind One King, that the ideal of the Fisher King—or any other myth that envisions a savior figure—just doesn't work, because no individual human being can live up to it. People who want that kind of power typically shouldn't be trusted with it, and that's what Lance figures out during the course of the book.
I was especially struck by your use of real-life poets as characters in One King: Arthur Rimbaud, Jack Spicer, in all their eccentric glory. How easy—how difficult—is it to weave well-documented biographies of famous figures into the fictional tapestry of a Secret History?
Irvine: Rimbaud and Spicer were both easier than they might have been in this regard, for different reasons. Rimbaud's early life is exhaustively documented, but once he goes to Africa in the 1880s, the records are pretty sketchy. So I did the reading, found dates when there's no documentary evidence of his location, and spun things out from there. There were some happy accidents there, too; when I first read a biography of Rimbaud and got to the point where he gets the tumor on his leg, I had just gotten done with a ton of reading about medieval Grail stories, and I thought, hey, that's a Fisher King wound. A whole lot of the book wrote itself right there.
Spicer, on the other hand, is much more of a writer's writer, who was fairly influential on some other poets but never got any kind of wide readership. His partisans are very partisan, but a lot of people don't know who he is, and quite a few readers of One King assumed I made him up. So I had a lot of room to tweak his character to fit the book. I think it worked out, since his biographer Kevin Killian—whose book Poet Be Like God was very useful to me in writing One King—wrote me out of the blue to tell me he thought I'd nailed Spicer's personality. That was a nice moment of validation.
It was a lot harder (spoiler/in-joke warning) to sneak Edgar Allan Poe into A Scattering of Jades, since people appear to have dug up records of where Poe was during practically every moment of his life. I got lucky that I could place him in New York exactly when I needed him to be there, because there would have been no way to fudge it.
Both One King, One Soldier and The Narrows involve quite a lot in the way of sports, especially baseball. Why this emphasis?
Irvine: Because I like baseball. In the 1940s and '50s, when those two books are set, baseball was still the national pastime, and it made sense to have people go to ballgames because it's something they would have done and because I like writing about baseball. (This was one reason why Spicer was so perfect for One King; he really was a huge baseball fan.) I like soccer even more, but it's harder to write about, especially for an American audience. I would love to write a great American novel about soccer, but haven't figured out how to do it yet. The one idea I have doesn't take place in America.
Your latest novel, The Narrows, is set in Detroit in 1943, a venue you evoke masterfully. Why Detroit, why 1943? Was it the concatenation of wartime weapons production, unstable labor relations, race riots, etc., that drew you? Or something more historically fundamental, Detroit's long record of disaster and near-disaster?
Irvine: Thanks. The times were certainly interesting, and I'll admit to carrying a bit of a chip on my shoulder here. I grew up near Detroit, and I wanted in a sense to stand up for the city, particularly its role in World War II armaments production. That war was won in the end because we could build stuff faster than the Germans and Japanese could blow it up (an oversimplification that will get me in hot water with hobbyists and armchair historians, but in broad strokes it's true). There's also some disguised family history there—one set of my grandparents met at the Willow Run bomber plant, and I've had quite a few relatives pass through various Ford and GM factories.
More important for the book, though, is what you're getting at toward the end of the question. Detroit has been on the brink of extinction several times over its 300-year history, and then it's had thriving periods, but they never last. The history is fascinating, and there's a lot I couldn't get into the book. Probably there is a ton of interesting history behind every big American city; I'm also kicking around a novel idea set in 19th-century Denver.
The Narrows opens brilliantly, in a section of Henry Ford's industrial property set aside for a rabbi—a fugitive from the Nazis—to use as assembly line in the transformation of river mud into golems, a new weapon against the Axis powers. What first got you thinking about a possible juxtaposition of heavy industry and occult activity, and by what stages did the idea develop from there?
Irvine: I don't actually remember where the idea germinated. At some point I had a thought about a golem assembly line, and the story took off from there, with some extra ironic fun because of Henry Ford's well-known anti-Semitism. (And not just Ford; Detroit also gave the world Father Coughlin.) At one point I was thinking of turning the book into a fantastical history of the Ford family from Henry's birth to Edsel's death, but then I decided the more interesting story would center on the line rats.
I'd been carrying the catastrophic Dwarf, the Nain Rouge, in my head for years, waiting for the right story to put him in, and I think the original idea that eventually became The Narrows involved a family whose history is linked with the Dwarf's appearances. Probably it's Michael Chabon's fault that golems got involved. Then I started thinking about an occult World War II in which each of the warring powers is trying to mobilize the creatures from its own mythology, but that idea got too big; at one point I was envisioning a dogfight in the skies over Detroit involving Thunderbird and a squadron of Teutonic witches raised on Walpurgisnacht and flown over. That would have been a lot of fun to write, but I wanted the book to be focused on an average Joe with average problems. Which leads to your next question. ...
Yes, indeed. The hero of The Narrows, Jared Cleaves, is an average sort: a family man, unable to fight at the front because of a maimed hand, an assembly-line worker with marital problems, difficulties with his self-image, work-place discontents. Much of the time, his story reads like a mainstream novel of character, circumstantial and domestic, yet outrageous supernatural elements intrude, generating excitement, intrigue, life-or-death confusion. Why did you choose to marry the mundane and the fantastic in this very interesting manner?
Irvine: One of the axes I have to grind with genre SF and fantasy is that too often nobody actually has to work for a living. You've got your nobles, your self-made millionaires, people living surprisingly comfortable lives without ever actually punching a time card. So I may overreact in the other direction, by focusing on working people. Even in a world where the supernatural is real, you've still got to make the mortgage and keep the car on the road and figure out what to do with the kid when you have to work late. And let's face it, the intrusion of the supernatural into your life is very different when you can't draw on the resources of the Barony of Falconburger or use your great-aunt's summer place in the Hamptons as a base of operations from which to root out evil.
The underlying plot of The Narrows—the clash of Axis and American intelligence agencies over access to dangerous otherworldly beings, the fateful Nain Rouge and a Nordic dragon—is kept obscure for most of the novel, hinted rather than revealed. Why such indirect narration?
Irvine: Because most people involved in great enterprises have no idea of the scope of the enterprise. This is particularly true in wartime, when news is heavily massaged/filtered/censored; most Americans in 1943, for example, didn't know the Holocaust was happening, even though some stateside newspapers had begun to report the existence of concentration camps. I wanted to stay focused on Jared, and walk the reader with him through this series of frustrations and revelations in an atmosphere of uncertainty. He hears so many things from so many different people that he has no idea what to believe, and he's got to balance his responsibility to family against a perceived responsibility to participate more decisively in the war effort. As he discovers more and more about what he's gotten himself into, the stakes get higher and higher, and the choice between family and ideals more fraught. If I'd laid everything on the table at the beginning, there would have been no way to build that tension.
Also, this is going to sound strange, but I wanted the monsters and supernatural beings to be just furniture, insofar as that was possible. By keeping the spectacle to a minimum—i.e., no Hexenwaffe swooping down Woodward Avenue—I could keep the focus on the effects of these huge events on Jared's life.
You have an SF short novel out from Subterranean Press: The Life of Riley. Set in the near future, this is an intricate tale of alien visitation, America's decline and redemption and a lot more, told in fragmentary, quite oblique fashion. Four narrative angles, none of them fully informed or entirely reliable. ... What motivated this fascinating formal experiment?
Irvine: The initial idea was to write a future version of the Gospels, with all of the uncertainty and bias and incompleteness of those texts. Religious extremism fascinates me, in part because my father is a fundamentalist wacko. So thinking about the Gospels, I started wondering what it would be like to have your parents believe you were divine, and the rest of it unspooled from there.
At first I thought Riley was going to be a full-length novel, and wrote it that way, but it didn't work. Then I let it sit for five or six years before pulling it out of the drawer (well, hard drive) and cutting maybe 30,000 words out of it before rearranging the rest into four stories. Before it had been intercut among seven or eight viewpoints, and narratively was much more complete. I like it better now.
What lies next for you? Presumably another novel; but also novellas, a second full-length story collection?
Irvine: I've got a near-future noir novel in the works, which I don't think anyone will compare to a Tim Powers novel. I'm also in the middle of two or three novellas, a pile of short stories, and two media tie-ins. One of those is a Batman novel; the other is a novel about the Marvel group The Ultimates. Next summer, I think, Night Shade Books will be doing my second story collection. It's tentatively called Pictures From an Expedition.
And on top of all of that, I just got hired as an English professor at the University of Maine, teaching creative writing, so my plate is pretty full.
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