Copyright © 1990 by Sean Ware (bingo@erinyes.org)

In late February a sort of Homecoming occured for several members of the Wabash community as Dan Simmons returned to his alma mater, twenty years after graduation. His keen eye and brilliant wit mix well with a sure sense of purpose producing an enlightening voice in the darkness of modern fiction An admitted genre writer, that is, science fiction and horror, Dan Simmons has produced four critically acclaimed novels, several short stories, and for at least one occasion a short attempt at a television screenplay.

As a significant portion of our interview centered on a relatively unknown sub-set of science fiction known as cyberpunk, it seems somewhat necessary to say a bit about a genre which at one time was simply known as The Movement. Bruce Sterling -- himself a cyberpunk -- writes: throughout the Sixties and Seventies the impact of SF's last designated movement, the New Wave, brought a new concern for literary craftsmanship to SF. Many of the cyberpunks write a quite accomplished and graceful prose, they are in love with style, and are (some say) fashion conscious to a fault. But like the punks of '77, they prize the garage band aesthetic. They love to grapple with the raw core of SF: its ideas. Like punk music, cyberpunk is in some sense a return to roots. The cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly science-fictional world.

Cyberpunk is very much a break from other types of science fiction. Critics acuse the 'punks of spending far too long in description of their near-future worlds of neural shuts, designer drugs, and netrunning computer hackers that hey lose sight of the story. In one sense, that seems to be exactly the point. Cyberpunk is a representation of the "modern day" literature of 2047.

An overwhelming paranoia permeates cyberpunk literature, a reaction to the increasingly technoschocked real world. The works of the cyberpunks is paralleled throughout Eighties pop culture: in rock video; in the hacker underground; in the jarring street tech of hip-hop and scratch music; in the synthesizer rock of London and Tokyo. This phenomenon, this dynamic, has a global range, cyberpunk is its literary incarnation. Science fiction has always been just that: fiction about science -- most notably technology. But the cyberpunk's Science is no longer enshrined in an ivory tower. For the cyberpunks, technology is visceral. It is not the bottled genie of remote Big Science buffins: it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us but next to us. Under out skin, often inside our minds.

Terrifying in its ideas, gripping in its color and exhilarating in its authentic uniqueness, cyberpunks has permanently changed the shape of Science Fiction. Authors like William Gibson, Lewis Shiner, Bruce Sterling and Walter Jon Williams all shared in creating the Movement, and now it is time for SF authors to absorb it and move forward.

I took the opportunity of Dan’s visit to talk with him about science fiction, its impact upon literature and society, his experience of Wabash, and writing.

Sean Ware: You’re a graduate of Wabash, 1970 majoring in ... what? It seems you read everything you could get your hands on.

Dan Simmons: Yeah, my major was the Library. I was really shocked when they insisted that I choose something. So it had to be English. I wanted it to be English, Philosophy, History. Everything else except Math. I didn't want that ... Physics or Biology.

SW: And you end up writing science fiction.

DS: Yep.

SW: Just finished reading your book [Hyperion]. It is Canterbury Tales all over again, and I was wondering how much the literary influence at Wabash had affected your writing?

DS: Wabash influenced every part of my life because I learned what being an educated human being meant while I was here -- it didn’t necessarily rub off on me, but I learned what it could mean to be educated. As far as my writing goes, the two people at Wabash who most influenced me were Bert Stern -- who was a poet and a writer who recognized me as a writer, possibly the single most important thing that can happen to a young writer -- and Wally Fertig, then the head of the English Department, who suggested I go on the Philadelphia Urban Semester to write. Besides being a delightful man, Fertig was a Chaucer scholar. I can’t say that I absorbed a scintilla of what Walter Fertig knew or thought about Chaucer, but twenty years later when I had to decide on a format for the first of my two Hyperion novels, The Canterbury Tales immediately came to mind.

SW: You worked on an underground newspaper at some point when you were here, yes?

DS: Yes, as with all underground things in the Wabash gentlemanly tradition, it was a semi-pseudo-scholarly, polite, literary underground newspaper.

SW: Called?

DS: It was called the Satyr, and I forgot how many issues there were: six or seven. We had some good people writing for it, I mean really good people writing for it. People like Keith Nightenhelser, who now teaches Greek and Classics at DePauw, Joseph Sinzer who must have made his first million by now, Duane Hockenberry -- a brilliant young writer who was murdered a few days after graduation -- a wild and articulate assortment of campus radicals and philosophers and angry black students ...… really good people. And it also included some guy ... some hack named Bill Placher. I don’t know what happened to him. He had a penchant for deep thought back then. Probably doing screenplays or something ... rewrites.

SW: So the Satyr wasn’t just a criticism of the Bachelor.

DS: No, there was enough criticism of the Bachelor without us jumping on the bandwagon.

SW: It was more serious than that.

DS: Yeah, it actually started almost as a joke. There was some right-wing fundamentalist group that put out some little newsletter. I think it was called the Prude. It was supposed to be satirical, a parody, but essentially it was a Young Americans for Freedom rag and that group was already a parody. So we put out the Satyr as a reaction. The Prude had one issue. The Satyr kept going. We had faculty members writing for it -- Dr. Finley Campbell, a dynamic black professor, offering polemic and political analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Don baker writing poetry, political activists such as Bert Stern sharing some of their views on the anti-war movement that was going on. The faculty was using the pages of the Satyr to argue with us and with each other. Later I did a piece on the one -- probably only -- faculty member at Wabash who many students thought was not competent, My Most Unforgettable Character Assassination. We handed out free copies at his final exam. Right after I handed out the free copies I went in and took the exam, because I was in the course. Not my smartest move. It stirred up a lot of fuss, but it was fairly tame for the decade. I still treasure the Ace Double Novel issue we did right before we graduated -- non-fiction on one side, and original fiction and poetry by students on the other. That was the issue which carried an essay by Bill Placher and a brilliant story by the late Duane Hockenberry. I think it's one of the finest anthologies of college work I've seen ... and it was produced solely by students.

SW: What have you noticed about Wabash coming back? Is this your first time back since you graduated?

DS:I've stopped by twice over the years, both times in the summer while driving cross-country from Colorado to New York. Both times the place was pretty empty ... but this is really my first return. And I have to admit that I am amazed at how it hasn't changed. I know it must be different ... people must think differently after twenty years, the faculty has changed, and the students are probably much more sophisticated than we children of the crazy sixties ... but speaking as an old, pot-bellied alumnus coming back after twenty years, I think that with the exception of a few benches around a few trees, it looks amazingly as it did when I was here.

SW: Talk a little bit about Science Fiction. Basically, why Science Fiction? What got you interested? What did you read?

DS: I think it was third grade, my older brother, who is much older, came for Christmas and brought me an entire box of old Ace double novels: pink on one side, blue on the other. Magazines, fanzines, science fiction, Astounding -- that's how old. I just went into -- I was reading anything and everything anyway -- but I went into the frenzy of reading science fiction, and it was a pretty good time to read science fiction. Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine was producing some of the early literary science fiction, interesting stuff. Even some of the old double-novels were thought provoking as well as being fun. And I just realized that it was for me. I think a lot of kids whose mental growth outruns their maturity gravitate to science fiction. And a lot of writers do to. There are writers who wrote science fiction because they wanted to write when they were sixteen or seventeen and they didn’t know anything. They didn’t know how to drive a car. They had never had sex ... never got close to having sex. What they knew about the world ... they didn’t know what a mortgage was, what equity was, they didn’t know anything about business, but they wanted to write. So what do they want to write about. Not about cleaning your room and fighting with your parents, but you can always write about driving air cars and flying spacecraft. Science fiction is called the literature of ideas, and it appeals to a lot of smart young people right around the time of adolescence.

SW: Have you been writing science fiction since adolescence?

DS: Since fourth grade and my pen-name was Christopher Starr and in 1957 I used my dad's old Remington upright typewriter to compose a story about the first trip to the moon. I remember reading it to my fourth grade class and Mrs. Grossaint, the teacher, interrupting to say, "No!" And I said, "Excuse me?" And she said, "It will never happen. People will never go to the moon." "Not even in the year 2000?" I asked. The year 2000 was the absolute end of time as far as I was concerned in 1957. "Never," she said. "If God had meant for us to fly in space ..." et cetera et cetera. In the summer of 1969 I was still in the ghetto of Philadelphia after my urban semester there, and as soon as I watched Neil Armstrong's foot come down on the lunar soil, I reached for the phone to try and track down dear old Mrs. Grossaint. She'd up and died or something. I didnt have my revenge.

SW: Who do you remember as major science fiction author influences upon you?

DS: It’s hard to isolate specific influences, but books like Jack Vance’s Big Planet stand out. I remember reading Dune when it was serialized in the giant oversized Analog and waiting for the next one. It’s strange to be thirteen years old or whatever and to be reading something like Dune and be saying to yourself: "This is a watershed. This is a basic change in the canon of the literature." And you don’t even know what a watershed or a canon is! Years later, when I read Ursula LeGuin’s Left hand of Darkness it was the same type of thing. I knew at once that it was going to change the face of science fiction. And that’s rather fun as a reader, to be part of the changing genre, to be in a position where you can see new ideas and styles coming -- to watch new writers of great talent explode on the front of SF.

SW: One of the latest changes I’ve noticed in SF is the cyberpunk movement. What are your thoughts about cyberpunk?

DS: Cyberpunk is new, but it is also passé. As with so many literary movements -- including the so-called New Wave, which my friends Harlain Ellison and Michael Moorcock helped create in the early seventies -- writers create something new and hot, but by the time the audience catches up to it, the writers themselves have gone beyond it. That is the case with today’s cyberpunk fiction. All of them, except its founder Bill Gibson, have moved on to something new, and Bill certainly is pondering his nex step. Imagine my shock at hearing about his new movement -- the cyberpunks -- a few years ago. Here I was hot out of the corral, just having published a few things in the SF magazines, working on my first novel when I learn from friends that the whole genre has been cut into two groups – cyberpunks (I didn’t even know any at the time) and the BOF’s, the Boring Old Farts. And I was one of the Boring Old Farts. But cyberpunk is exciting. People who haven’t read science fiction in t he past decade, people who think of it as "sci-fi", or people who think Asimov and Clarke represent SF -- these people have no idea how exciting the cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk stuff is. To me it’s as if we perfected these little trolleys which can send a sealed container forward and bring back a novel from thirty, forty, or fifty years in the future. Just a contemporary novel from 2026. It’s as if we’re sitting in 1942 and reading books from 1990 -- image the references and social textures we’d be missing. AIDS, Watergate, the Vietnam War, the feminist movement, computers, microchips, the rise of Japan as an economic superpower … it does stagger one. And the cyberpunk movement was a quantum leap in such textural imagination. It weaves a tapestry that convinces us that this is what the future will be.

SW: Do you think they are right?

DS: No, no science fiction writer has ever been right, if you’re talking about predicting the actual detalis of the future. In a way, however it is right because the fact that it has been written and read and thus will have some effect on the future we create. Just as Kubrik’s 2001 helped create some of the things that now resemble his vision of 2001. In that sense the cyberpunks my affect the future. The difference is that the vast majority of people will never tap into the cyberpunk milieu. To experience cyberpunk sensibilities, one has to read the books and stories -- and the great majority of Americans don’t read. And of the beleaguered two percent of the population that does read, a very small percent of them read science fiction. So to become part of the cultural iconography, Neuromancer will have to be turned into a movie. Bladerunner was a film with cyberpunk texture and context, but it lacked brains. The cyberpunk writers have brains galore, but critical intelligence seems to be anathema to Hollywood. William Gibson is a frighteningly bright person. I was having dinner with him a few months ago and I said, "Well what was your personal foremost experience of futureshock? I know you’re creating it for us, but what’s happening ..." And he said, "Well two weeks ago I was in Tokyo and I got lost. I got off the train, the metro, in the wrong part of Tokyo, which was about thirty miles from the right part of Tokyo. And here I am wandering at 3 a.m. down some quiet street, bathed in neon and rain." And he says, "And I come across a street corner dispenser of liter bottles of scotch. And the thing is humming and talking to itself in Japanese." And that is, that’s Bill Gibson to me. My guess is that we’ll se that scene somewhere in a Novel of Gibsonian Sensibility.

SW: Yes, indeed, it is in there. Leading out of that, do you still see the split between the BOF’s and the cyberpunks, or has the field come back together?

DS: No, the split -- if there was one -- has healed. On of the first reviews of my SF novel Hyperion, and essay in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine notes that Hyperion is one of the first post-cyberpunk novels to take the entire cyberpunk canon, the whole cyberpunk experience and just accept it as a given. Isaac Newton once said that if he stood so tall, it was because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. And, of course, I’m just stepping on the shoulders and head -- and hopefully not the faces -- of the cyberpunks. But I’m going beyond that.

SW: Do you see science fiction as a whole shaping the world-view of today, 1990?

DS: I see science fiction movies shaping the world. I don’t see science fiction literature affecting it much. In the seventies -- this may date me back -- in the early and mid-seventies, speculative fiction seemed ready to claim an image for itself somewhat more exhaulted than the stereotype of a garage mechanic, his greasy hat on sideways, reading a pulp SF magazine with a cover showing an endangered maiden fleeing a Bug-Eyed Monster. For a few years there before Star Wars and other brilliantly stupid movies set written SF back sixty years, we were almost respectable. SF is such an attractive field to write in that sooner or later every "serious" writer does something that by any other name is a science fiction nveol. The so-called "serious" writer can step into SF, can write something like The Handmaid’s Tale without her reputation being damaged. But the most serious SF writer -- someone who began in the genre -- can write a feminist allegory far superior to The Handmaid’s Tale, and there are many, or superior novels no any topic, and they just won’t be taken seriously by the literary establishment. It just won’t happen. The publisher will slap on a cheap sci-fi cover, the bookstores will rack it far back in the sci-fi slums, and the readers will never discover it. Of course the literary establishment allows a few of us to cross over -- especially if we have the good grace to go crazy and die young, as Philip K. Dick did. I think that if science fiction is going to affect society, then literate people have to discover that some world-class fiction is being written by people inside the SF genre. Meanwhile, the word "Sci-Fi" -- which was by the way, coined by the fannish editor of the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, a man who wouldn’t recognize literary SF it bit him on the ass -- the word "sci-fi" scares intelligent readers away. You must know that.

SW: Yes, so do you then think science fiction should deserve the label of actually being literature. I mean, it’s no longer pulp magazines pounded out in the 1940’s.

DS: Science fiction does not deserve the label of literature, any more than the bulk of contemporary novels qualify as literature -- as a group. But I feel that individual novels and stories in SF should not be dismissed the way they are now ... that they should have the same chance to be tested by time and generations of readers that any book does to become literature. Films have probably added more visual symbols to the cultural iconography than any other source over recent decades ... just think of the crowded rainy streets of Bladerunner or the spacecraft in slow motion to the Blue Danube Waltz. But with the exception of 2001, these films are empty -- content-less. Their plots are feeble or riddled with logic errors, frequently borrowed from fairy tales or old westerns or somesuch, their characters are cardboard, and their science is non- existent. The reason is that the young directors have never read literary SF -- or almost anything else, for that matter. If they read, they read comic strips and comic books So we -- the movie audience -- are getting the brilliant comic books on the screen, produced and directed by children for children. Look at the phenomenally successful Batman. Tim Burton, the director, was brilliant, lighting, set direction, model building, special effects, even the acting was wildly amusing. Everything came together to create astonishing images. However, it cannot transcend itself -- it is still a comic book.

SW: And you would like to see that change?

DS: I’ve waited my whole life to see that change. If the best images from science fiction are truly going to enter the general consciousness, if cultural icons are going to be challenge the way SF writers such as the cyberpunks have struggled to challenge them, then it will have to be a thorough collaboration with film.

SW: Do you want to make Hyperion into a film?

DS: That would be fun, wouldn’t it? The thing about Hyperion is, to me, the staggering thing is that current film technology would allow it. However, everything else about movie-making would not allow it: the "collaborative effort" syndrome, which generally means the producer’s girlfriend is going to get to make major script changes; the constant that Hollywood always thinks that science fiction has to be "dumbed down" to audiences ... they start with pretty primitive plots and then they say let’s make it dumber since the audience is so terminally stupid. I love the look of Bladerunner, but the movie is nuts. It is so illogical that it violates all of its own premises. The book by Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, was no masterpiece, but at least it didn’t violate all the premises it set up in its early chapters just by forgetting they were there or because Dick assumed the reading audience was too stupid to remember them.

SW: Changing the topic a little, obviously, you started writing from when you were a little kid, how did you finally break into the idea of writing novels?

DS: Well, first I started with short stories, which is not the common way to do it any more. So many people do try to start with novels. My own preference is to work through short stories if for no other reason than if once you’ve done a novel it’s hard to go back to short fiction. Might as well do it while you can. I feel that short fiction is the way to learn ... to find the pitfalls you have to avoid in longer fiction. Every word must be important and necessary in a short story, and learning to write that way cuts down on sloppiness in the longer form of the novel. I wrote in college and then there was a long hiatus where I continued to write but nor for publication. In 1979, I decided to write for publication and made a decision. I was visiting the head of the English Department at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and he showed me the way to chart a career as a "serious" writer: write for the literary "little" magazines, publish a novel at a small press after ten years or so, try to get noticed by the critics, et cetera. I drove from new Hampshire to pick my wife up at the Maine Photographic Workshop, and thought about my friends’ advice all the way back to Colorado -- three day of driving. And all the way I was thinking -- Is this what I want? When I saw the Rockies looming up out of the high plains I realized that it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to write for the largest markets and audiences I could find, while still writing the best fiction I could manage. In a sense I decided that I wanted to be F. Scott Fitzgerald; I could still do Gatsby while being paid by the Saturday Evening Post. That was my theory. Two years later, in 1981, I was pretty discouraged. I hadn’t found the right markets ... or I’d found them and they didn’t want me ... and I was on the verge of abandoning writing when the writer Harlain Ellison encouraged me. Actually, the encouragement took the form of Harlain promising to rip my fucking nose off if I didn’t stay serious about the writing and get published. So I did both. And Harlain is still my friend and I still have my nose.

SW: Any advice for writers, young college students?

DS: Advice ... don’t you think it’s useless to give advice?

SW: No, I’m asking.

DS: O.K. writers who are reading this know who they are. They’re the ones who know in their gut that they’re going to be writers. They’re the ones who will ask for advice, but certainly not follow it. They know they’ll write for publication someday. They also know they’re not ready. They know that their writing doesn’t come anywhere near what they like to read. They see the tremendous distance between what they are doing and what they want to do. Everything seems stacked up against them. And it is. Everything ... the state of the publishing industry, the disapproval of parents, the compulsion to go out and "get a real job," the very real need to support oneself, the number of dilettantes and poseurs who pretend to be writers and give the real writers a bad image -- everything is stacked against the young writer. But my advice to this writer is to be like the cavemen in the movie Quest for Fire. Remember those poor slobs out there, freezing on the tundra, fleeing to the swamps when the beasts and tougher cavemen chased them there? They had one tiny little ember of fire which they kept going, and that meant the difference between survival and extinction. That ember has to be kept burning. In our case, the ember is keeping alive the internal conviction that you are a writer. And you have to act on it. You cannot let huge lengths of time pass where you don’t act on it. And by acting, I mean writing, trying to get published -- honing your craft -- arranging for a "real job" so that you’ll have more time to write, which will always be your real job. Do something every day and every week to continue in the direction of becoming a writer. The good news is that for these people for whom that ember burns continuously, they end up as writers. Every writer I know has had those hard times, has had odds piled against them, but they managed to reach the goal -- what for most of us is publication and the opportunity to write full time.