DB: You’ve cited Beat writers and poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud as influences on cyberpunk, which absolutely fascinates me. How do you find that these authors influenced cyberpunk, and your own work?
JS: I think they’re influences on cyberpunks because they were underground writers of their time; they were the “alternative,” they accepted that whores and drug addicts and drunks and dirt could have a place in their writing. And they in turn influenced people like Dylan and Bowie and Lou Reed. I know for a fact Rucker was influenced by Beat writers, like Kerouac and Gary Snyder . . . “The street has its own uses” for technology, I think Gibson said that. So those people were “street” writers like we were, but we brought technology and “outside” scientific ideas into it. I wasn’t so very nihilistic, at heart, though I sneered at mainstream SF a good deal, along with all “square culture”—I was influenced by reading the Transcendentalists, like Emerson and Thoreau, and also by metaphysical thinkers like William James and Ramakrishna and Alan Watts. I was always in search of transcendence—something I had in common with Rudy Rucker. The other cyberpunks are gritty realists, in terms of philosophy. Perhaps high-tech existentialists. As for the Beats, I liked some of them—I liked their boldness, the wild flow of their writing.
DB: As a musician and lyricist yourself, it makes sense that rock music is a huge theme throughout your work, from City Come a-Walkin’ to A Song Called Youth. Can you talk a little about the connections and interplay between your work in these two different creative mediums? And what role did music play in birthing and defining the cyberpunk genre overall?
JS: I tried for a long time to find a way to truly fuse these forms. I wanted to write lyrics that evoked science fiction/urban fantasy/horror, as well as other scenes, and I wanted to write prose that called up the visceral, libidinous, angry energy of hard rock and punk rock. “Anger is an energy,” John Lydon said . . . I tried to write stories that structurally had opening verses, a chorus, and a guitar solo, somehow, in the prose. I described futuristic concerts in many of my books—in Eclipse, in City Come a-Walkin’, elsewhere. These were my passions and I was aware that a lot of great artistry is about fusing things that hadn’t been fused before. It didn’t work for many editors and it didn’t work for all readers. To me it’s like what someone said about the Velvet Underground, that they weren’t a big hit but spawned a generation of bands. I know I’ve influenced a lot of people . . . I particularly found that rock people were NOT impressed by science–fiction writers! But I persisted as a writer and a songwriter—Blue Öyster Cult has recorded many songs with my lyrics. And I’m STILL in a rock band—the Screaming Geezers—and I have another project coming out—someone’s described it as Lou Reed meets prog-rock—called Spaceship Landing in a Cemetery. I never give up. And my new SF novel Stormland is now looking for a publisher. “The present-day composer refuses to die.”
JS: I tried for a long time to find a way to truly fuse these forms. I wanted to write lyrics that evoked science fiction/urban fantasy/horror, as well as other scenes, and I wanted to write prose that called up the visceral, libidinous, angry energy of hard rock and punk rock. “Anger is an energy,” John Lydon said . . . I tried to write stories that structurally had opening verses, a chorus, and a guitar solo, somehow, in the prose. I described futuristic concerts in many of my books—in Eclipse, in City Come a-Walkin’, elsewhere. These were my passions and I was aware that a lot of great artistry is about fusing things that hadn’t been fused before. It didn’t work for many editors and it didn’t work for all readers. To me it’s like what someone said about the Velvet Underground, that they weren’t a big hit but spawned a generation of bands. I know I’ve influenced a lot of people . . . I particularly found that rock people were NOT impressed by science–fiction writers! But I persisted as a writer and a songwriter—Blue Öyster Cult has recorded many songs with my lyrics. And I’m STILL in a rock band—the Screaming Geezers—and I have another project coming out—someone’s described it as Lou Reed meets prog-rock—called Spaceship Landing in a Cemetery. I never give up. And my new SF novel Stormland is now looking for a publisher. “The present-day composer refuses to die.”
John Shirley (far right) fronted the post-punk funk-rock band Obsession in the 1980s, with guitarist Chris Cunningham and bassist Jerry Antonias. Photo courtesy of Paula Guran.
DB: If there was one memory (time, place, show) that evoked for you the cyberpunk scene of the 1980s . . . what would it be?
JS: Sterling, Rucker, Shiner, and I walked out of a panel at a convention in Austin in protest to the jeers of the backward staid science fiction status quo—and that was solidarity, you see. It was the recognition that we represented something in particular, together. We were not all the same but, still, it was a movement as real as the Beats.
DB: You’ve mentioned that in the 1970s and 1980s, you, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling used to correspond via letters. Those sound like they would make for some interesting reading. What kind of ideas, observations, stories did you exchange back then? Do you think those letters influenced your (collective) work?
JS: I constantly use email but regret it has destroyed the literature of epistles, of real letter writing. I regret, too, that I did not take care of those letters as well as I might’ve. In our letters we were like other young writers, bitching about the field, muttering about editors, flailing about trying to impress one another, but also observing the world at large. We talked of concerts we’d seen, shared strange observations of the world, comparisons of technology, suggestions about writing—I got lots of those suggestions from Gibson and Sterling and Shiner! In my letters you could find something puerile, something deeply insecure, but a relentless seeking after creativity.
DB: One of our favorite “secret history” topics is projects that were aborted or abandoned, or for one reason or another never came to fruition. Since you’ve done a fair amount of work on television and movies, I imagine you have some stories. Are you at liberty to share details on any of your favorite pieces that never made it all the way to the screen (or the page)?
JS: Sometimes, when it came to television and film, things didn’t happen because someone stole them. I have a SF-horror novel called Crawlers that was originally an elaborate movie pitch. A young studio producer at a small outfit asked to read the treatment, then said no to it—then went on to steal the idea, even the title! And he wrote a script. It wasn’t made into a movie but its existence prevented me from selling my novel as a movie, later. Gibson and I wrote an adaptation of Gibson’s “New Rose Hotel” story. This was taken up, and I guess we got paid something—and then the script was sucked into Abel Ferrara’s buzzed world, and our adaptation was basically discarded. A movie was made—but it wasn’t ours. Gibson and I wrote a script called Black Glass, together. Cyberpunk in a pulpy sort of way. Detective stuff, tech ideas. It went hither and thither about LA, and then was back-burnered. Gibson let me have the story so I turned it into a novel by that name.
DB: Let’s talk unsung heroes of science fiction and fantasy (via any medium). What are your favorite “cult classics?” What works or creators do you believe should get more credit and attention than they do—and why?
JS: I think Cordwainer Smith and R. A. Lafferty and Phil Dick and James Tiptree were influences on me and Rucker and other writers of avant SF. I think Smith did some of the earliest true cyberpunk. Delany’s novel Nova was an influence on cyberpunk—brain/tech fusion inspiringly envisioned. Phil Dick’s later SF novels were an influence, I’m sure. Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stuff had to influence some of us. Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. Certainly John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up affected me personally—environmental concerns show themselves in much cyberpunk, especially mine—and his Shockwave Rider influenced cyberpunk. Harlan Ellison’s “Repent, Harlequin . . .” piece was an influence on me—and his A Boy and His Dog. Certainly, Ballard is prescient (just wait!): The Drowned World and his surreal The Crystal World should be rediscove
red. Ballard’s The Concrete Island is a dirty gem of a book . . . And now we most of us live on a “concrete island.”
An Interview with Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Thomas Olde Heuvelt (b. 1983) is a Dutch novelist who works in the realms of the fantastic. His critically acclaimed horror novel HEX (2016) became a worldwide bestseller with editions in twenty-six countries, including the United States, China, Japan, and Brazil, and was called “totally, brilliantly original” by Stephen King. Screenwriter Gary Dauberman (It, Annabelle) is currently working on the first season of a TV series based on HEX. Olde Heuvelt’s short fiction has been nominated for several Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. In 2015, his story “The Day the World Turned Upside Down” became the first ever translated work to win a Hugo Award.
DB: Your influences include big names in genre like Neil Gaiman and Stephen King, but also a number of writers who are more associated with literary fiction. Can you talk about your varying inspirations and what they bring to your work?
TOH: Whenever I finish reading a horror novel, I pick up a work of literary fiction. I do this because I both love scary fiction and well-crafted, stylized writing. Not to say that these can’t go hand in hand, of course. But I love strong voices, the kind of writers when you read one sentence, you immediately know it’s them, like Chuck Palahniuk or Jonathan Safran Foer. As an author, you learn so much from reading a varied spectrum of genres and authors. When I was younger, I even used to completely write out a page from a random novel, word-for-word, and the act of doing so made me aware of how other writers put words in a different order than I was naturally inclined. I’d then try to write a page of my own in their style, and I did this with everyone, ranging from Stephen King to Isabel Allende to Vladimir Nabokov. That’s how I developed my own voice—by picking up what I liked, and dropping what I didn’t. Today, my only condition for the books I pick out to read, is they have to invoke a sense of wonder. A few of my favorite novels—for exactly that reason—are Life of Pi by Yann Martel, The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall and, yes, Pet Sematary by Stephen King.
DB: What works or creators do you believe should get more credit and attention than they do—and why?
TOH: Since I have an outside perspective, I’ll leave the discovery of new talented U.S. writers to others who are closer on top of that. But as for published works, I think everyone in the world—both fans of the fantastic and literary fiction—should read Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Lullaby, because it’s outrageously funny and so cleverly crafted. As for King’s work, Revival is very much underrated. It’s one of his more recent novels, and marks a turn back to the really dark stuff he was writing earlier in his career . . . but it’s also a fantastic gem about the span of a lifetime.
DB: HEX is an amazingly creepy novel, and the English version clearly has some influences of the New England Gothic. What resources did you draw on as you crafted this sinister setting in upstate New York?
TOH: I studied American literature at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands and at uOttawa in Canada, and was introduced to all the good stuff there—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and the lot. When I was looking for a U.S. setting for HEX, I thought it was quite fitting to use the breeding ground of the American gothic. The original 2013 edition of the book sets in a small Dutch town in the hills, so geographically, it showed some resemblance. Of course, I physically went there as well. The town of Black Spring, New York, is fictional, but the location is very real. It’s right in the Black Rock Forest, two hours up the Hudson from New York City, near the West Point military academy. All these assets were of great use to the story.
DB: You’ve talked about how Dutch literature doesn’t have a long history of the fantastic. Do you think your own work has a Dutch essence? What would a uniquely Dutch fantastic look like?
TOH: It’s true, we don’t have a tradition of the fantastic. Dutch culture is very Calvinistic in nature, and our literature is as well. It’s originally not plot-driven, but driven by interior monologue. One of the all-time classics of Dutch literature is a novel called De Avonden (The Evenings) by Gerard Reve. It’s a book about nothing. It spans ten days of nothingness. Nothing happens in it. Then you read on, and still nothing happens. I was forced to read it in high school at the age of fifteen, and my literature teacher called it “an exploration of boredom, a celebration of nothingness.” And I was like, wait a minute. This is where I draw the line. Give any fifteen-year-old this book and it kills their joy in reading. I wanted to celebrate something, not nothing. By then, I was already reading quite a bit of American fiction, and I discovered that it, contrary to Dutch literature, was always plot-driven. Not only the horror novels, but also literary novels. Stuff happened in these books. And I loved it. Nowadays, Dutch literature is much more international than it used to be, but there’s still not a lot of the fantastic. Still, I use our Dutch, down-to-earth nature to my advantage, because it’s part of who I am. The key element that makes HEX work, is that the people in town aren’t really afraid of the supernatural element that’s haunting them, they’re used to it and frankly, kind of annoyed by it. I always say: If a sane person sees a seventeenth-century disfigured woman appear in the corner of their living room, they’d probably run and scream. If a Dutch person sees a seventeenth-century disfigured woman appear in the corner of their living room, they’d hang a dishcloth over her face and read the paper. And maybe sacrifice a peacock to get on her good side. I feel this take on it makes the book uniquely Dutch, and that’s why it is such a success in my home country.
DB: As your followers on social media no doubt know, you’ve done a lot of world traveling. How do these experiences show up in your work?
TOH: A lot—like any life experience you gain. The people you meet, the emotions you feel, the journeys you make, it’s all part of the tantrum of the writer’s life, and therefore, the writer’s fiction. For any writer, life and fiction go hand in hand. As for the influence of traveling on my fiction in particular, I can name a few examples aside from the Americanization of HEX. After spending a few months with my uncle and aunt in northern Thailand, I wrote “The Ink Readers of Doi Saket,” a short story that was nominated for a World Fantasy and a Hugo Award a few years back. It’s about the myths and magic and mysteries of Thai culture. After being the guest of honor in a convention in Croatia, I used one of their local urban legends in my story “You Know How the Story Goes,” which is about a mountain tunnel near Opatija on the Adriatic Sea. And my new novel is about a mountaineer and leans heavily on my own experiences as a mountain climber in the Swiss Alps. But then, it’s also a story about love, and I draw on my own experiences with love. It’s all tangled.
DB: Do you have any abandoned novels you don’t mind telling us about? Or temporarily shelved novels you hope to return to one day?
TOH: I do. It was a big deal for me when HEX became so successful around the world. It’s now been published in twenty-six countries, and for a relatively unknown Dutch author, it’s not an everyday thing when suddenly Stephen King tweets about how “brilliant” he thought it was, nor when the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal write rave reviews. It was all I ever wanted, but it also put huge pressure on the next one. I found myself thinking with every new paragraph I was writing: What will the Guardian say about this? Will King actually like this? Which is, of course, the stupidest thing you can do. So it took me a while to find the ability to write freely again, and in the process, I abandoned a horror novel called November. It’s about a group of really good people who are forced to do really bad things to prevent something worse from happening. It was a really dark story, and I loved it, but somehow, the time wasn’t ripe for it. I’m pretty sure I’ll get back to it after I finish the novel I’m currently working on.
DB: Are there plans to publish more of your novels in English? I’d love a chance to read PhantasAmnesia.
TOH: Ha—PhantasAmnesia was my second novel, and I wrote it when I was nineteen and twenty. It’s a 60
0-page brick that could well have done with 400 pages. It was published with a small imprint in the Netherlands and before I had my first tough editor. Looking back at your early works, it always feels you’re cringing. Like looking at pics from puberty, and you go: Ouch, I remember, that’s what I looked like back then. My first two books are out of print and I’m not sorry for it. Every now and then some Dutch fans show up with secondhand copies of them, but I currently don’t have any plans to reissue or even rewrite them. I’d rather look forward and write new stuff. So, no—these early works will not be available in English for a while. I would love to have my fourth novel published around the world, though—the one that came before HEX. It’s called Sarah, and it’s not a horror novel but a work of magical realism and humor. It’s a very personal story, and I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written.
DB: What are you working on now?
TOH: I’m still promoting HEX—it’s amazing how this book has such a long life. In 2018 I’ll be touring countries like Brazil, China, Ukraine, Poland, and France for my publishers in these countries. Aside from that, I am currently finishing my next novel. The way HEX was my twist on the witch archetype, this one is my possession novel. What gets old in possession novels is the religious aspect. There’s always a demon or a devil or an evil spirit who possesses a person and a priest comes to exorcise it. We all know the story. I’m not a religious or very spiritual person, but as I said earlier, in my spare time I’m a mountaineer, and whenever I’m in the mountains, I feel like mountains are elevated, living beings. Like they have a soul. Other mountaineers have come down with similar stories. And each mountain has a very specific, different soul that is unique to that particular mountain. They are places of power. So I thought, wouldn’t it be great to have a mountaineer who has a horrible accident way up during a climb, and comes down possessed by the soul of the mountain? To have this force-of-nature-gone-bad raging inside of him? That’s the premise of the new book.
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