An Interview With Ian Benke
You need to stand back and allow the project of the moment to take on a life of its own. At some point in its creation, nearly every worthy piece of fiction gets away from its author; he or she ends up in terra incognita — and that’s how it should be. A well-designed fictive thought experiment yields outcomes that surprise both writer and reader.
Science Fiction and Fantasy are hugely popular genres. What does it take for a writer today, to write compelling and successful Science Fiction and Fantasy stories? Authority Magazine started a new series called “How To Write Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories”. In this series we are talking to anyone who is a Science Fiction or Fantasy author, or an authority or expert on how to write compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy .
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing James Morrow.
Born in 1947, James Morrow has been writing fiction ever since, as a seven-year-old living in the Philadelphia suburbs, he dictated “The Story of the Dog Family” to his mother, who dutifully typed it up and bound the pages with yarn. Upon reaching adulthood, James channeled his storytelling urge into the production of speculative literature. Most of his novels are written in satiric-theological mode, including the critically acclaimed Godhead Trilogy. He has won the World Fantasy Award (for Only Begotten Daughter and Towing Jehovah), the Nebula Award (for “The Deluge” and City of Truth), and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (for Shambling towards Hiroshima). In recent years the author has composed historical fiction informed by a fantastika sensibility, including The Last Witchfinder (about the birth of the Enlightenment) and Galápagos Regained (about the coming of the evolutionary worldview). The French translation of Galápagos received the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share a story about what first drew you to writing over other forms of storytelling?
Evidently I was born with a need to tell stories, a drive so intense I would almost call it erotic. Over the years, this throbbing appendage to my psyche was attracted to various media. The biographical paragraph above speaks of the dog fantasy I dictated by my mother. Mom actually ended up transcribing a whole cycle of such efforts — primarily derivative adventure yarns. During the first decade of this century my fiction found a home at William Morrow (no relation), but my first publisher was Emily Morrow.
I have some artistic ability, and I drew dozens of comic books in my pre-teen and early teen years (funny animal stories and Mad magazine-like movie parodies). My high-school friends and I also staged spook shows in our parents’ attics, and then we started making 8mm genre movies (featuring poorly synchronized dialogue coming from a reel-to-reel tape recorder), including adaptations of The Tell-Tale Heart and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Our Coleridge epic received an Honorable Mention in the Kodak Movie News Teen-Age Movie Contest.
But then I returned to the medium of “The Story of the Dog Family,” prose fiction, and I’ve stuck with it, year in, year out. Novels and short stories enable me to conceive sweeping narratives with spectacular backgrounds, and I never have to worry about finding backers, going over budget, or getting the special effects to come out right. Because the stakes are so low, novelists enjoy tremendous artistic freedom (unless, of course, they run afoul of that bastion of nihilism, the Republican Party).
You are a successful author. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Sigmund Freud once remarked that the goal of psychoanalysis is to take misery and turn it into unhappiness, and unhappiness is a personality trait that’s proved especially useful to me. Not misery or clinical depression, which can be paralyzing, but unhappiness (I find Freud’s distinction profound) — that is, dissatisfaction with both oneself and the political status quo. My unhappiness with the East-West nuclear standoff of the 1980’s energized me to write my third novel, This Is the Way the World Ends. My unhappiness with received theological wisdom inspired my subsequent project, Only Begotten Daughter, which relates the adventures of Jesus Christ’s divine half-sister in a contemporary Atlantic City.
The other personality trait that sustains me is, paradoxically, happiness. When I’m deep into a project that seems to be flourishing — that is, the fictive thought experiment is playing out with élan — I enter a state of bliss. The narrative hook of my fifth novel, Towing Jehovah, is that God has died, his corpse has fallen into the sea, and these remains must be hauled by supertanker to a tomb in the Arctic. Now, that’s a terrible idea for a novel — embarrassingly bald, absurdly schematic — but by living with it for a two-and-a-half years, I came to believe that these events were actually happening, and this made me incredibly happy.
Finally, I would say that my personality spectrum includes a wide band of perfectionism — which can sometimes be a curse, of course, but it’s largely a blessing. When you write a novel, you’re crafting something that’s theoretically perfectible, even as the outside world goes about its business of being horrendously flawed, and that’s a heady feeling. Naturally you’ll never achieve your ideal, and at certain point you must sell the damn manuscript so you can buy groceries, but during the composition process you find yourself galvanized by the illusion of fashioning something that might, just might, be free of blemishes. I’ve always appreciated this wry definition of my preferred medium: “A novel is a long work of fiction that has something wrong with it.”
Can you tell us a bit about the interesting or exciting projects you are working on or wish to create? What are your goals for these projects?
At the moment, I’ve got three balls in the air — a short story, a novella, and a novel. The story, “The Optics of Infinity,” is about an orbiting platform reminiscent of the Webb Space Telescope. Dissatisfied with its role as a mere minion, the on-board computer goes berserk and starts sending back false narratives about the origins of the universe.
The novella, Behold the Ape, tells of Sonya Orlova, the Woman of a Thousand Faces, a successful 1930’s horror-film actress. When Sonya crosses paths with a gorilla whose brain has been swapped for the frozen cerebrum of the late Charles Darwin, the two eccentrics join forces to create a series of evolution-themed monster movies.
The novel, tentatively titled Madly in All Directions, is rebuke to the architects of the climate-change crisis, just as This Is the Way the World Ends was an attack on the Reagan administration’s cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons. With a nod to the Hollow Earth theory, I’ve invented a human civilization occupying the underside of our planet’s crust. Quondonia is plagued not with global warming but global freezing — a rather blunt allegory, I’ll admit, but then so was the premise of Towing Jehovah.
My goals are always the same: to delight, astonish, and disorient the reader.
Wonderful. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Let’s begin with a basic definition so that all of us are on the same page. How do you define sci-fi or fantasy? How is it different from speculative fiction?
Those three fictive modes — SF, fantasy, speculation — aren’t clearly delineated in my mind. The novel-in-progress I just mentioned draws sustenance from all three idioms. Madly in All Directions is a hybrid critter whose ancestors include Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts.
But let me hold forth briefly on “science fiction.” Try this experiment. If you feed “science fiction” into Google Translate and select Latin as the target language, the software will deliver “scientia ficta.” Leave off the “ficta,” translate the remainder back into English, and what word do you get? Knowledge. Science fiction is knowledge fiction.
In my view, the genre was seeded by the knowledge revolution that more-or-less began with Galileo’s demonstrations of uniform acceleration (a counterintuitive principle that Aristotle of course got completely wrong), proceeded through Newton’s majestic conjectures about motion and change, and reached an apex in the 18th-Century Enlightenment, the Siècle des Lumières. But the seed was not the tree. Science fiction as we know it became possible only after the Zeitgeist was commanded by figures like Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was at once an Epicurean atomist and a dazzlingly intuitive poet.
The glory of our genre is that it fuses both of those bedrock human impulses — the material and the magical, the rational and the romantic. That’s why Frankenstein is our seminal text. (I once promised myself I would never use the word “text,” but there it is.) I endorse Brian Aldiss’s conclusion, which he first shared in Billion Year Spree, that Mary Shelley is the mother of us all.
It seems that despite countless changes in media and communication technologies, novels and written fiction always survive, and as the rate of change increases with technology, written sci-fi becomes more popular. Why do you think that is?
I’m not certain that written SF has become more popular than it was, say, during the heyday of the Dune phenomenon or the age of bestselling Star Trek novelizations. I’ve always appreciated this definition by the late Phil Klass, who wrote satirical but weirdly convincing SF stories throughout the fifties and sixties under the name William Tenn: “Science fiction is the mass literature of the very few.”
If people are indeed balancing their visual-media diets with large helpings of the written word, I would say that’s because literary SF addresses cravings that movies and TV don’t reliably satisfy. I have in mind our desire to see mindboggling ideas developed in full, our hunger for alternative realities bursting with verisimilitude, and our need for aesthetic experiences that are, as I suggested above, simultaneously sensational and cerebral.
Serious ideas have always been at a premium in visual SF. The whole Star Wars phenomenon is basically a cycle of borderline fascist swashbucklers gratuitously set in “a galaxy far, far away.” George Lucas is a great showman, but he’s not much of a thinker. And don’t get me started on the epidemic of elephantiasis that we call the Marvel franchises.
The only movie I can think of offhand that provides the sort of cerebral thrills we get from The City and the Stars or Childhood’s End is 2001: A Space Odyssey — and we all know who co-wrote that movie in collaboration with Stanley Kubrick.
In your opinion, what are the benefits to reading sci-fi, and how do they compare to watching sci-fi on film and television?
It seems to me that most works of literary science fiction are thought experiments designed to explore some technological, political, philosophical, or metaphysical possibility. These stories and novels are written with a palpable seriousness of purpose — even when they pour from the pens of satirists like myself.
When it comes to the visual media, the financial gamble is typically so extreme that seriousness of purpose becomes the last thing on the minds of the show runners, producers, and funding sources. Consider what happens when the sophisticated novels of H.G. Wells get translated to the screen. In The War of the Worlds, Well had a lot of sardonic fun turning British colonialism on its head; his Martians are acting out their own deranged version of what Kipling called “the White man’s burden.” The movie adaptations of The War of the Worlds (a cycle that obviously includes Independence Day) are simply mass spectacles of death and destruction, entertaining enough but hardly food for thought or occasions for awe.
As for The Island of Dr. Moreau, none of the cinematic incarnations to date — The Island of Lost Souls from 1932, Terror Is a Man from 1959, and the versions of 1977 and 1996 — evinced the slightest interest in Wells’ audacious and delectably blasphemous concept of Moreau as the thuggish sky-God of the Western religious tradition. All four of those adaptations were essentially conceived as horror movies.
What authors and artists, dead or alive, inspired you to write?
As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, I was fortunate to have Joseph Heller for a one-semester course in playwriting. We Bombed in New Haven was in tryouts at the time, though it didn’t bomb in New Haven and went on to have a semi-successful Broadway run. I remember Heller as a wry, hilarious, self-effacing man who personified the principle, “Take your work seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously.”
And his influence stuck with me. The Battle of Midway reenactment in Towing Jehovah owes quite a bit to Catch-22, and the Chicago Tribune called Only Begotten Daughter, “sort of a Catechism-22.”
My other sources of inspiration likewise occupy the pantheon of satirists: Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
If you could ask your favourite Science Fiction and Fantasy author a question, what would it be?
Monsieur Voltaire, how does it feel to know you have disciples and devotees in the first quarter of the twenty-first century? Please answer as acerbically as possible.
We’d like to learn more about your writing. How would you describe yourself as an author? Can you please share a specific passage that you think exemplifies your style?
It would be okay with me if someone incised SATIRIST on my tombstone instead of SCIENCE FICTION AUTHOR, though I’d prefer both epithets. In either case, I would like first line to read, JAMES MORROW 1947–2047.
The Locus review of my first stand-alone novella, City of Truth, declared “James Morrow wields a darkly glittering scalpel,” and over the years I’ve stuck that blade into many targets. My second stand-alone novella, Shambling Towards Hiroshima, satirized the Manhattan Project. It turns out that, while the U.S. Army was sponsoring the atomic bomb, the Navy had implemented a rival project aimed at creating the ultimate biological weapon: gigantic, fire-breathing, bipedal lizards that the admirals imagine unleashing on the Japanese homeland.
The sequel to Towing Jehovah, Blameless in Abaddon satirized the mental gymnastics and tortured logic in which humans engage to avoid the conclusion that God is either malign or nonexistent. The villains include a roman-à-clef version of the eternally glib C.S. Lewis, whose The Problem of Pain is perhaps the most infuriating book I’ve ever read.
In my fourth stand-alone novella, The Asylum of Dr. Caligari, I attempted to satirize the human affection for armed conflict, using the arguably meaningless Great War of 1914–1918 as the focus of my anger. As the story unfolds, the director of Träumenchen Asylum, the demented Dr. Caligari — I appropriated the character from the famous German silent film — uses alchemy so create a painting that beguiles young men from all the European armies into seeking glory on the battlefield. The opening beats go like this:
From its birth during the Age of Reason until its disappearance following the Treaty of Versailles, the tiny principality of Weizenstaat lay along the swampy seam between the German Empire and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg like an embolism lodged in an artery. Ruled by a succession of harmless hereditary monarchs whose congenital mediocrity enabled their respective parliaments to run the county without royal interference, Weizenstaat was for many generations a prosperous and idyllic land. Then came the Great War, and when it was over this polyglot nation had simply ceased to exist, annexed by Luxembourg without the consent of the principality’s citizens, who were accorded the same measure of control over their fate that a cow enjoys in an abattoir.
Prior to its dissolution, Weizenstaat was known primarily for three institutions: bedrock political neutrality, a banking system sympathetic to the requirements of monopoly capitalism, and a sanitarium called Träumenchen Asylum. So successful were the treatments pioneered at this maison de sante — most famously the eponymous Caligari system — the people of Weizenstaat took to joking that their country’s principal import was irrationality and its principal export rehabilitated lunatics.
My personal journey to Träumenchen began many miles from Weizenstaat, at the 69th Regiment Armory in midtown Manhattan. On the 17th of February, 1913, the Armory opened its doors to a month-long exhibition of modern European paintings and sculptures (complemented by some indigenous pieces), the most audacious such show ever to disturb the digestion of an American critic. Having recently graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, aflame with the naïve notion that avant-garde images were destined to cure the complacency of the bourgeoisie, I could no more have passed up this landmark event than the moon could waltz free of its orbit.
Because my story is inextricably linked to the Great War, its genesis in a military reservist training facility seems poetic to me. The Armory Show changed my life. It changed many lives. Words can never convey the exhilaration of my encounter with Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, that fragmented Cubist figure in whom the sensual and the mechanistic existed in such riveting equipoise. My pen will never rise adequately to the occasion of Henri Rousseau’s Jaguar Attacking a Horse, the violent event playing out in a jungle at once savage and serene. No earthly language is equal to André Bourdelle’s gilded bronze masterpiece, Herakles the Archer, the demigod taking aim at the Stymphalian birds while balanced on a rock from which he has seemingly sculpted himself.
So what does a bookish farm boy from central Pennsylvania do upon realizing his eyes are in love with Pablo Picasso’s Woman with Mustard Pot? He learns to speak rudimentary French, borrows two hundred dollars from his doting Aunt Lucy, assembles a portfolio of his best charcoal sketches, watercolors, and unframed oils (most of them tableaux of urban life rendered in his impression of Impressionism), and finds a job peeling potatoes aboard a freighter bound for Le Havre.
My crossing occurred without mishap. I proceeded directly to Paris by train, hoping to locate Señor Picasso and perhaps find employment as his apprentice. Although my Pennsylvania Academy diploma read “Francis J. Wyndham,” I’d decided to represent myself as “Zoltan Ziska, descended from a line of North American gypsies famous for their spare but powerful folk art.”
Things did not go as planned. Enraged by my presumption, Picasso escorted me to the second-floor landing outside his Montmartre studio, threw my portfolio down the escalier, and, taking me by the shoulders, pushed me in the same direction. I tumbled to the bottom, humiliated but unharmed. Rube Descending a Staircase. As the coup de grâce he hurled a jar of azure-tinted turpentine toward my recumbent form (he was evidently still in his Blue Period). The glass struck the wall and, shattering, stained my white shirt with pale blotches. For several weeks I declined to wash the shirt, regarding it as a Picasso by other means, but in time I decided that the afternoon’s true artistic event had been the spectacle of my ejection from the mad Spaniard’s life.
Based on your own experience and success, what are the “Five Things You Need To Write Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories?” If you can, please share a story or example for each.
First of all, you need to cultivate a love of thought experiments and acquire a taste for grand ideas. A beginning SF writer who can imagine one day tiring of the Überquestion that undergirds our genre — What if? — should consider going into a different line of work.
My first short story, “The Assemblage of Kristin,” which appeared about a century ago in Asimov’s, turned on the question, “What if a group of organ-transplant recipients were mysteriously drawn to each other, realized that the donor was in every case the same person, and began sensing that she seemed to enjoy a tentative resurrection when they were all in one place together?” I decided the group would form a society dedicated to sustaining this ghostly Gestalt of their mutual benefactor.
Secondly, you need to fool yourself into thinking that the story or novel you’re presently crafting will change the world — and for the better. This is an unhinged frame of mind, of course, but it’s also energizing. The British editor of This Is the Way the World Ends sent that book to every member of Parliament, so at some level she, too, must have shared in the grand delusion.
I would invite the beginning SF writer always to remember that the genre’s remit is to speculate coherently about the cosmos. Science fiction tacitly defines the world as not only a conglomeration of communities but also a discrete island in the void. It implicitly defines humankind not simply as an aggregate of identities but as a species called Homo sapiens sapiens. Embrace that remit, damn it. Play to win. You might make a fool of yourself, but that’s better than playing for a draw.
Three, you need to acquire a working knowledge of the physical sciences. Those modes of understanding will never exhaust the world, of course, nor should they, but they’re way ahead of whatever’s in second place. I’ll always be pleased that the author and critic Norman Spinrad, in his review of Towing Jehovah, called that novel, with its preposterous premise, a work of “hard science fiction.”
I’ve never had formal training in the physical sciences, and my high school and college science courses never spoke to my soul. But fifty-five years ago I made a 16mm impressionistic documentary about a clinic in Philadelphia that treats brain-injured children, and I prepared for the challenge by attending lectures in neurology, immediately finding myself enthralled by what was known (way back in 1967) about the most amazing of the human organs. I’ve been an armchair student of biology, physics, chemistry, and cosmology ever since. Better to be a bewildered dilettante, I figure, than to join the legions of the incurious.
Even a fantasy writer, I believe, should study what the physical sciences have to say about our world. Tolkien once remarked that the trees, flowers, and mountains in fantasy literature should be taken at face value. They’re every bit as real as the trees, flowers, and mountains in mainstream mimetic fiction.
Four, you need to cultivate an appreciation for all sorts of literature, at the levels of theme, characterization, and style. I think the worst way to prepare for a career in science fiction or fantasy is to read science fiction or fantasy exclusively. Find your inner omnivore.
The comedies of Jane Austen, which are hardly exemplars of SF, come immediately to mind. The consummate satirist Phil Klass, whom I mentioned earlier when attempting to define SF, was a passionate Austen reader. I think also of Karen Joy Fowler, who has given us many exquisite thought experiments, including her first-contact novel, Sarah Canary. But eventually she wrote the bestselling Jane Austen Book Club.
Five, you need to stand back and allow the project of the moment to take on a life of its own. At some point in its creation, nearly every worthy piece of fiction gets away from its author; he or she ends up in terra incognita — and that’s how it should be. A well-designed fictive thought experiment yields outcomes that surprise both writer and reader.
When I started composing Towing Jehovah, I had no idea why God had died, merely that his two-mile-long corpse would appear in the Atlantic Ocean and a supertanker captain would be appointed by Heaven and the Vatican to lead a burial detail. Only when I began composing the climax did I realize that God had committed suicide — deicide? — the better to allow his creatures to grow up.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Entertainment, Business, VC funding, and Sports read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we both tag them 🙂
I would love to have lunch with Julia Sweeney and find out if she’s still on her inverse Road to Damascus, gleefully walking away from her childhood religious indoctrination.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
My Wikipedia article can be accessed here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_K._Morrow
Here’s my website:
Here’s my Facebook Author Page (though I don’t do as many postings as I should):
https://www.facebook.com/JamesMorrow.novelist/
Here’s my favorite review of a James Morrow novel: Ron Charles of the Washington Post reacting to The Last Witchfinder.
And here’s one of the few critics who really understood my last hardcover novel, Galápagos Regained.
https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/galapagos-regained/
Thank you for these excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent. We wish you continued success.
About The Interviewer: Ian Benke is a multi-talented artist with a passion for written storytelling and static visual art — anything that can be printed on a page. Inspired by Mega Man, John Steinbeck, and commercials, I.B.’s science fiction writing and art explore the growing bond between technology and culture, imagining where it will lead and the people it will shape. He is the author of Future Fables and Strange Stories, the upcoming It’s Dangerous to Go Alone trilogy, and contributes to Pulp Kings. The CEO and Co-Founder of Stray Books, and an origami enthusiast, Ian is an advocate of independent, collaborative, and Canadian art. https://ibwordsandart.ca
Author James Morrow On How To Create Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.