orn in 1942, Terry Bisson is one of American SF's most admired short-story writers. His collections to date are Bears Discover Fire (1993) and In the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories (2000), with Greetings & Other Stories to follow in 2005.
Penetratingly satirical, yet always profoundly humane, Bisson's oeuvre also incorporates six novels: Wyrldmaker (1981), Talking Man (1986), Fire on the Mountain (1988), Voyage to the Red Planet (1990), Pirates of the Universe (1996) and The Pickup Artist (2001). His most recent book is the short novel Dear Abbey, published in late 2003.
I interviewed Terry Bisson by e-mail in March 2004.
What first drew you to SF and fantasy? Did you immerse yourself extensively in the genres early on, or were your important influences more from the cultural mainstream?
Bisson: SF was my first literature. What drew me to it were the neat ideas, the exteriorality. Kids are not interested in the literature of interior design.
I went straight from the Oz books to the '50s short stories, the great Conklin & Merril anthologies: Surface Tension and Mimsy Were the Borogoves. Heinlein and Asimov never did it for me. It was City and The Golden Apples of the Sun and Childhood's End. Then I lost the thread entirely when the Beat Generation came on the scene. They dangled Fame and Personality.
I never wanted to be Clifford Simak or Ray Bradbury. This was a long, wrong turn, and I missed the New Wave entirely. The best writers of my generation—Barry Malzberg, Thomas M. Disch, James Sallis, Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, Norman Spinrad, Charles Platt, Michael Moorcock—were tipping the genre out of the cradle while I was struggling to be a "mainstream" writer in the mid-'60s. Who knows, if I'd gone to London and wandered into the right pub I might have fallen in with them. Instead, I was in New York, cooking a Kerouac chowder which never sold and has since been mercifully lost.
SF back then was something I remembered fondly, like the kite or the merit badge. It never dawned on me that it might be Literature as well.
What's your educational background? Was becoming a writer always your ambition, or was breaking into print more of an accidental event?
Bisson: My educational background is standard American suburban postwar public schools. I studied English in college, but I decided I wanted to be a writer in junior high. My eighth-grade teacher asked us to write something about night, and she was so impressed with what I turned in that she copied it out on the blackboard and then read it aloud to the whole class. I remember something about "as the banshee wings its way over the lonely moors." I must have been reading Lovecraft, because we were pretty short on banshees and moors in western Kentucky. I fell in love with the sound of my own words (I thought then that they were mine) and knew I wanted to write. Other teachers encouraged me, too. I was lucky to be born in a town and a time when wanting to write was fairly unusual. My best friend, Joe, and I got lots of attention. He's now the Kentucky poet laureate!
In your early novels, you mixed SF and fantasy fairly freely. Why this impatience with orthodox genre boundaries?
Bisson: That seems a misreading. I love and honor the boundaries. If I were a critic, you'd find me out riding fence. True, my first novel, Wyrldmaker, was a bit of a mix—a quest written in high middle-Moorcock, complete with flagon and dragon, ending with an SF argument (that organic life is a singularity, a one-time event). But Talking Man was strictly fantasy, with automotive iconography. It's magic when they never run out of gas, isn't it? Anyway, that was it for me and the wizards. My next two novels, Fire on the Mountain and Voyage to the Red Planet, were deliberately, consciously, resolutely SF with no fantasy elements whatsoever. I remember thinking that I wanted to do a traditional space-travel SF tale, to show my respect for the canon. Sort of like a rock band playing "Johnny B. Goode." I have only written one fantasy since, a short story called "Death's Door" for Flights, Al Sarrantonio's upcoming fantasy anthology.
You've come to be regarded as one of American SF's leading satirists. In your view, why do SF and satire combine so fruitfully? And whom do you regard as your most important creative predecessors in this area?
Bisson: Actually I don't think of myself as a satirist. I guess I am, though, if people say I am. Maybe satire is just humor with a social edge, or agenda. I'm not sure SF and satire always combine so fruitfully. Those whom the world despises sometimes take themselves a little too seriously. ...
Vonnegut certainly was an early influence; there was a time when I thought that Mother Night was the very Ulysses of oddball literature. Eastlake, too: The Bronc People. Though my principle influence is probably R.A. Lafferty. His rich Shakespearean cadences are more pleasing to one like me whose ears are attuned to the cry of the banshee as it wings its way over the lonely moors. What the f--k is a banshee anyway?
If you are a satirist, how would you define your satirical technique? John Clute has observed that you love introducing seemingly very improbable ideas into your stories, then developing them with absolute conviction, perfect verisimilitude ...
Bisson: Much as I like Clute and admire the vertiginous amplitude of his
post-parnassian insinuations, you could say that about anybody. Deadpan is what you do. I think my trademark might be that my narrators are a little stupid. That's a common literary device, too. Flatters the reader.
Your possibly interrelated novels, Talking Man and Fire on the Mountain, impart a distinct utopian vision: an alternate America, socially and racially harmonious, just, at peace with itself. Is this your consistent political ideal? Is such a U.S.A. in some practical sense feasible, or must it always remain counterfactual, as in Fire on the Mountain?
Bisson: I do like happy endings. And I am a socialist, which is utopian these days. Fire came out of my involvement with the "New Africa" wing of the Black movement. I was part of a white anti-KKK group called the John Brown Committee. The New Africans' idea of a Black republic in the South had great appeal, so I used it in the book. What if. The other source for that novel (my shortest, and most complicated, with three narrators) was John Brown himself. He is considered a nut in American history, but if his raid on Harper's Ferry had succeeded, it would have shortened the Civil War. It was far from a mad idea; he was the only sane man of his time. I recently wrote a screenplay based on his life. Not SF at all. ...
In writing Fire, I liked the idea of Africa (instead of Europe) as civilization's lead pony. I think Stan Robinson stole the idea for The Years of Rice and Salt from me. He often steals from me. I have it on good authority that he'd never even heard of Mars before he read Voyage to the Red Planet.
Quite suddenly, starting around 1990, you became quite a prolific short-story writer. So often, authors begin with short fiction, as their apprenticeship for becoming novelists; you reversed this pattern. Why was this? And in your view, can short stories deliver results of which novels are incapable?
Bisson: I don't know about prolific. I wish. You can blame Stan. Seriously. He said, "Bisson, you need to cop an award or two, and competition is less steep in short fiction." Meanwhile, Ellen Datlow had been kind enough to ask me for a short story, and she published the first one I ever did. It was called "Over Flat Mountain" and Omni paid me $1,800. I had gotten $1,500 for Wyrldmaker, so this got my attention. As to what short stories can do that novels can't—all I know is that they work for me. I am not really a storyteller. I like to sketch out characters and situations; limn them, as it were, instead of round them out. I rarely just lean back and tell a tale, like some writers do. Maybe it's just laziness. Short stories are like cars: You get to work on a new one every week or so. Novel writing is like farming: You go out to the same field every morning, hoe in hand.
Your most famous story may well be "Bears Discover Fire," a multiple award-winner. What was the genesis of this tale? How quickly did it assume its final, published, form?
Bisson: It was quite easy to write. Perhaps because it allowed me to combine all of my "mainstream" concerns (nostalgia, a faint didactic tone, Southern gothic) with a loopy SF angle. The real genesis of the story is my upbringing in western Kentucky, 1/2 generation away from the farm, in the postwar suburbs where past and present met like a shoreline. It's really an elegy to rural America disguised as an SF story. When Gardner Dozois bought it for Asimov's, he said, "It's not SF, but let them shoot me." I was surprised and of course pleased that folks liked it so much. I think it's the bears. Bears are likable.
Returning to your novels: Voyage to the Red Planet is both satire and nostalgia trip, attack on corporate America and reflection on the Mars we've colonized imaginatively and lost. How did you balance those elements so gracefully: cynicism and sentiment?
Bisson: You are too kind. But it's a great idea, isn't it? I remember when it came to me. I was rambling through Central Park, and I thought, wow, an Actual High Concept—Hollywood finances the first Mars trip! I think anyone would have written it in much the same way. The satire comes with any Hollywood novel, and the sentiment comes with the grand voyage itself. I swiped the ending from Destination Moon, the movie. I recently sold that novel to China, which I think is a good omen.
Your succeeding novel, Pirates of the Universe, even more forthrightly plays on SF's garish past, as its title implies. In negotiating a world dominated by insane corporate and bureaucratic hierarchies, is the genre imagination a liberation or a hindrance?
Bisson: I wanted to call it Peteys, but David Hartwell wanted something more SFnal. The title comes from a Disney ride. I wrote it for Johnny Depp, who's also from Owensboro, Kent., and is a big fan of my work, or would be if he ever encountered it, I'm sure. By the time it hit the big screen, they had changed Universe to Caribbean, and you know the rest. Studio politics.
And then there's your most recent novel, The Pickup Artist, depicting the systematic elimination of older artworks so that new ones may have space to emerge. Is the postmodern world so information-saturated, so oriented toward disposability, that this dystopian scenario has symbolic truth?
Bisson: You said it.
Your long novella, Dear Abbey, which came out from PS Publishing in 2003, is a remarkable work, carrying its contemporary African-American protagonist billions of years into the future. How closely is this book in dialogue with H.G. Wells' conceptually and structurally similar masterpiece, The Time Machine? Is your vision of humankind's long-term evolution consciously at odds with Wells' (The Eloi and the Morlocks)?
Bisson: Quite consciously. The book was written as a polemic against not only Wells (who I love) but most modern (and postmodern) SF, which is pretty resolutely dystopian. I wanted to say that, on the contrary, we can and just might survive, not as weird simulacrums of humans but as ourselves. That if we make it through this current tech explosion (which has been going on since 1500) we might settle down to enjoy the life span of a successful earthly species, which is anywhere from 10 to 100 million years. I say all that quite explicitly in the novel. And yet it is perceived as gloomy! Perhaps that's because we never go to the stars and never encounter the Other. No first contact. We are alone. That's got to be a disappointment.
I tried to write Dear Abbey as a straight novel of ideas, with a time-travel frame, without the obligatory time-travel paradox. But I couldn't do it. The form itself calls for the paradox. It is truly obligatory. It was interesting to discover that.
Your short fiction has been especially noteworthy in the last year or so: For example, your novella "Greetings," featured on Sci Fiction in September 2003. In this truly savage satire, you describe a near-future policy of culling the aged; do you believe the progressive graying of America—the prospect that the elderly will eventually outnumber, and overburden, the young—might truly have such apocalyptic consequences?
Bisson: No, no, not really. It's not an apocalyptic policy but a window
dressing, a sort of affirmative action. Not that many people are affected by the euthanasia lottery. I am more exploring the idea of a world where voluntary suicide is acceptable. We're already almost there. It's like gay marriage, more an adjustment than an apocalyptic change. I think of "Greetings" as a story about good intentions gone wrong. And about death, of course. I've adapted it as a screenplay called "Habeas Corpus." On spec, of course.
Another recent tale, "Scout's Honor" (Sci Fiction, January 2004), is an extremely moving account of an anthropologist venturing back in time and communing with Neanderthals. What, specifically, prompted your thinking about the possible reasons the Neanderthals died out?
Bisson: Don't we all think about that? The story of human evolution, our planetary diaspora, the emergence of consciousness in organic life, is the greatest story in the universe, as far as I know. Certainly Sawyer, Bear, Auel, Golding would agree. My favorite book on the subject is The Dance of the Tiger by Bjorn Kurten, a Norwegian anthropologist. I am continually using his ideas. The anthropologist in my story, by the way, was based on Paul Park's brilliant autistic sister, Jesse. It occurred to me that she might understand our cousins better than any of us.
You've written quite a few media tie-in novelizations. What are the challenges, and the disappointments, of this sort of writing?
Bisson: The challenge is to create, scene by scene, the literary equivalent of a film, fleshing out in words what the camera sees. There are no disappointments, for there are no expectations. The reality is, it's an easy and not unpleasant way to turn a buck. I like doing adaptations, and try to remain transparent in the process. Like a good editor. The most fun was finishing Walter Miller's last novel (Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman). I was very proud of that, and disappointed in its reception, for his (late) sake as well as my own. I have less luck trying to create original material in a franchised universe. Lucas let me go after two Boba Fett kids' books. There was something about the idea of Boba as a serial pedophile that didn't agree with them.
What's next for you? Another novel, more short stories? Perhaps a third big collection?
Bisson: I wish I had plans for a novel, but I can't think of a neat idea. I
have a new collection coming out from Tachyon called Greetings & Other Stories (2005). I'm trying to sell my John Brown and Habeas Corpus scripts. Trying to sell radio plays. Working on a film about Mumia Abu Jamal with a cool young Hollywood producer. Trying to sell a book of SF plays. Reviving a feature I did for Eileen Gunn's Infinite Matrix, which will run as "This Month in History" in Locus. Meanwhile, I plan to hunker down and keep writing short stories until I am finally invited to the White House, and can refuse to go.
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