Q: Could you give a little more information about your background? What were you doing before you started writing?
Simmons: Since I graduated from Wabash College in 1970 I have been involved in education, not as a college professor but as an elementary teacher. I came out of school right as the Vietnam War was winding down, and I ended up going to graduate school to become a teacher. After quickly learning that I didn’t want to teach English to bored high school students, I taught elementary school for eighteen years. During that time I enjoyed teaching gifted children. So I set up programs for gifted kids, and have done some consulting with gifted education and the teaching of language arts. All that time writing was in the back of my mind. I continued to hone my writing skills—I hope—but the true passion was reading. After a while I decided it was time to fish or cut bait and get to work on the writing. I happened to meet Harlan Ellison right at the time when I was trying to decide whether to pursue it seriously, and he gave me no choice. He promised to rip my bleeping nose off if I did not try to write seriously, and when one is given that ultimatum by Harlan Ellison, one tries to write seriously. Within a year I was published.
Q: Could you describe your writing methods? Everybody is different: I collect them.
Simmons: I’m fascinated with writing methods too. I suspect it’s a literary strain of voyeurism. I tend to read Writers at Work in The Paris Review to find my cheap thrills. I’m finally getting some discipline in my writing methods, so day by day it’s a job now. Perhaps the thing of interest to my fellow voyeurs would be that Carrion Comfort and all the preceding novels were written longhand and revised longhand before being typed. I no longer have that luxury because of schedule deadlines, so I am working on a word-processor now. But I still print the first draft and scribble at it as much as possible. There is something about the kinesthetic feedback one gets while writing longhand which I enjoy. I try to follow set hours, but actually what I end up doing is setting a page limit per day and getting those pages done and rewarding myself as Hemingway used to do. He used to go fishing in his boat the Pilar if he got his required number of words done every day. I don’t have the Gulf Stream outside my window, but at least I can go take a walk or play with my child in the afternoon when she gets home from school ... if I get my ten pages done every day.
Q: All those years of reading must have been a preparation for your writing. So, what were you reading that influenced or directed you?
Simmons: The stock answer: reading everything. Actually, my interests changed as I got older, so that by the early ‘80s I was almost totally weaned, as I thought of it, from science fiction. As many adult males in the United States tend to do, I started reading a lot of history, a lot of literary biographies and so forth. I tended to choose more fiction that I considered “serious.” I tried to catch up on all the classics I had meant to read but hadn’t. And, it’s rather interesting that one science fiction story in the late ‘70s sent me back to science fiction. I hadn’t quite gotten away from all SF, but short science fiction had been disappointing me to the point I had abandoned the SF magazines, and most of SF novels seemed childish. Then I read a story called “Particle Theory” and I couldn’t remember the author’s name—
Q: Ed Bryant.
Simmons: Yes. I know now. Ed’s a good friend. It’s odd, because a year after I met Ed, I still didn’t associate his name with the story that sent me back to science fiction. It’s the ultimate insult when you can’t remember the author’s name; I’m damn good at that. But the humanity of the story, the juxtaposition with what I thought was the real feel of science fiction with true human concern, kept me interested in science fiction long enough that I discovered a whole new generation of writers. I regained my interest in the field. And people like Harlan also kept me interested, people who were moving fast enough and writing well enough that they couldn’t be nailed down to a genre. One just did not know what they’d be writing next. So, for a while there it was a rather a slim thread that kept me connected to the field I had loved for so many years. Now it’s like coming home to a family that’s grown in once’s absence as I read the new people and rediscover all the writers I used to enjoy.
Q: What about horror writers? Were you reading the classic ones, or just the moderns, or none at all?
Simmons: I’m fairly illiterate. I’ve read the classics—Frankenstein and Dracula and so forth—but I know little about Victorian ghost stories and so forth. Lovecraft, well, I have this respect from a distance because it’s simply not my taste. But there was one piece of contemporary horror writing which transcended genre even at the time, and which hooked me forever, and that was of course Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. There’s something about Shirley Jackson’s work that continues to resonate in my tiny little skull, so that even now, having recently reread Hill House after many years, it was just as effective this time around as it was twenty-five ago when I read it for the first time. So that’s the book that hooked me when I was fairly young, and upon rereading it I loved it just as much. The rest of the current crop of horror writers I’m just beginning to appreciate and catch up on.
Q: Are you encountering any problems with preconceived notions of what a horror novel is supposed to be? I am thinking of the problem Raymond Chandler had with his last novel, Playback, which made the publisher extremely frustrated because this was supposed to be a mystery novel, and there wasn’t even a corpse until 60% of the way through. Do publishers ever tell you to be scary on the first page?
Simmons: If you’re scary on the first page, publishers say, “Why did you wait so long?” But seriously I started with that problem of preconceived notions. My first novel, Song of Kali, can be read with no overtly supernatural occurrences. It can be read as a strictly psychological reaction to a city that’s a monster. But worse than that, the primary sin of that novel, which lost some readers but more editors, was that I seemed to set up the classic revenge scenario with a man’s child killed by someone in the Calcutta underground—almost literally the sewer underground of Calcutta, the strange, semi-mystical guild of gangsters and beggar-masters—and after someone had murdered his child, he went back to Calcutta to wreak revenge but then stopped. What I did was have him avoid the revenge so as not to participate in the cycle of violence that the goddess Kali represents. That upset editors. They felt that readers would not be satisfied by someone saying no to violence. Certainly it’s a hard thing to carry off dramatically. That was the difficult thing, not avoiding the expectations of horror genre per se, although they did want more overtly supernatural things, but in providing an honest and emotionally satisfying alternative to the cliché. But I think that by having Song of Kali end as it did, more or less over the protests of the experts who felt it didn’t follow the right plan, and then having readers over the years respond to the subtleties and the message beneath the omitted clichés, I’ve avoided a lot of battles later on.
Q: What would you write if you were to do something totally off-the-wall? A historical novel, maybe? The basic theoretical question about reader and publisher expectations I’ve always wondered about is this: what would happen if Stephen King wrote a light, romantic comedy?
Simmons: First, he would sell about six million copies of it.
Q: With a black cover and something menacing on it...
Simmons: Yeah. I wonder if Stephen King has really tried to do that. I remember at one point in his career he announced that horror was just a station on the way for him and he was going on to other things. Some of us are still waiting for the “other things.” I think what happens isn’t so much pressure from publishers or even readers. What happens is that I feel that King, and many of the popular writers, has been trapped by the urge to please. He wants to tell the stories not just to the largest audience, but to the most appreciative audience. For my part, I tend to have this perverse urge to write for people who don’t ordinarily read “that sort of thing.” But, on the other hand, I doubt I’ll do anything quite as off-t
he-wall as write a light, romantic comedy. A historical novel intrigues me, but I am a distant cousin of Bruce Catton so the historical side’s covered. I tasted that a little bit with “Iverson’s Pits,” the Civil War horror novelette I wrote for Night Visions 5. I found I was enjoying the research so much that I didn’t want to deal with the fiction. There was a non-fiction book in there that keeps fighting to get out. It’s quite possible that I’ll do something like that someday. Again, the only prerogatives that I’m fighting to keep are, one, to be allowed to tell the tales I want to tell, and, two, to be allowed to continue writing in whatever form that takes.
Q: You can’t be the grumpy person who sits in a corner and says, “I write only for myself and I don’t care what anyone thinks.” I know of writers who say that, but I don’t think any of them mean it.
Simmons: No, but I think there’s some happy middle ground. One goes to the publishing panels at these conventions. You hear the hopefuls there asking, “What do the audiences want? Two years from now, what kind of book will sell?” That’s self-destructive right from the start. There has to be a happy blend between writing what you want to write and being willing to please the readership. But you can’t run around and do market surveys, I’m convinced, as a writer. The publishers can do it all they want and then find whatever writer they want. But you can’t do a market survey and become a successful writer that way. I think that the writers whom I enjoy and that most people enjoy are simply writing books that the writers themselves would like to have read. If they don’t find the books, and if they don’t find them of sufficient quality, they write them themselves, and the readers are waiting out there to join them.
Q: On this note, it’s my instinct that sharecropped books and franchised books are just death...
Simmons: Yes. I won’t get into that, but there are certain rules about what I won’t write. I just shocked myself tremendously. I did work for hire, and I also just joined in a collaboration to write a Joker story for an anthology from Bantam of Joker/Batman stories. I realized that, okay, I’ve got all my prime rules: no shared worlds, no messing with someone else’s characters. However, the temptation to go back to when I was twelve years old and loving Batman was too great. My seven-year-old daughter enjoyed talking to me about it and helping me plot the story, and we have a big prop-up poster of the Joker in my study now. So it was fun, and it actually turned out to be an enjoyable learning experience collaborating with Ed Bryant on this story. So I guess that for all the hard-and-fast rules, there have to be exceptions.
Q: I suppose what really matters is that you keep writing at all. I don’t know who said it, but one of my favorite remarks on this is that sex is the best thing two people can do together, while writing is the best thing you can do alone.
Simmons: The variation on that is that writing is that shameful thing one does behind closed doors alone.
Q: I suppose we’re all basically bent.
Simmons: Amen.
THE SPIRES OF DENON, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
1
Meklos Verr took over once the command ship entered Amnthra’s atmosphere. He was a better on-planet pilot than anyone else on board. Besides, he preferred to do most things himself.
Even though he had the coordinates, Meklos flew hands-on. He opened the portals so that the cockpit, which jutted out in front of the small ship, seemed like it was encased in sky. He didn’t have quite a three-hundred-and-sixty degree view, although it was close.
Only the area directly behind him, where a door led to the area the crew usually called the bunkhouse, blocked the view.
It had taken two days to get to Amnthra from base, and that was about twelve hours longer than any group should have been in this vessel. But no other space-to-ground vessel had been available on short notice, so he had to take this one.
This part of Amnthra was isolated and sparsely populated. According to rumor, the ancients still lived in these mountains. However, no matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t find any independent confirmation of those rumors.
The Naramzin Mountain Range had some of the tallest peaks in this sector. It ran from east to west along Amnthra’s largest continent. In fact, except for the beaches along the edge of the continent, the range and its small hidden valleys were Amnthra’s largest continent.
Most of Amnthra’s people now lived on islands and the four smaller continents, which were mostly flat. The weather was good in those places, the soil rich, and life spectacular.
Or so the travelogues told him.
They also told him to avoid the Naramzins. Hostile terrain of surprising beauty, the travelogues said. Easy to get lost in.
Easy to die in.
Meklos had no intention of dying.
He also had no intention of getting lost.
He was heading to the largest valley on the continent—the Valley of Conquerors—where he and his team would camp before they hiked to the Spires of Denon—and the city beneath them.
The Spires of Denon were the reason he had to leave the ship so far away. They were delicate, so delicate that scientists believed that the wrong harmonic vibration would shatter them, and one of the great treasures of the Lost Age would disappear forever.
He could see the Spires in the distance, rising like Earthmade skyscrapers into the clear blue sky.
Right now, he didn’t care about the Spires. Right now, he worried about landing, hiking, and working under such restrictive conditions.
He had agreed to those conditions—had, in truth, hired on for them. But he didn’t like them.
And he liked them less as the peaks of the Naramzin Range came into view. The Naramzin was unconquerable—that was what the ancient texts said, which was why the Denonites had, for a time, conquered every known civilization on Amnthra.
It wasn’t until Amnthra got rediscovered by the other peoples in the sector that the Denonites actually got defeated.
And then they disappeared.
One of the great mysteries of the Lost Age.
And one he wasn’t about to solve.
He was just here to provide security—not that he could find any real reason for it. He had done some research, in the limited time he had before taking this job, and it looked like no one and nothing threatened the group of archeologists who worked the ancient city of Denon.
His people needed a rest. They’d gone on a rescue mission two months before and found themselves in the middle of a civil war. Two weeks and four deaths later, they managed to rescue some university professors who had wandered into the wrong encampment.
He’d given the bulk of his team a vacation. Fifteen remained—the fifteen who, like him, didn’t believe in time off.
So he’d force them to take it with this easy job in one of the great sites of the Lost Age.
He had a hunch he might even enjoy this job himself.
2
Gabrielle Reese stood hip-deep in the chalk-covered water. The water was cold against her waders. Her hands were growing numb, which was the worst thing for this work. Even the tip of her nose was cold.
She stood on an unstable pile of rocks, which partially blocked the center arch in the underground caverns. She had wedged herself against the wall and what might have been a stone protecting a small cubby.
She could see the statue in the glare of her headlamp. The statue was small, black, and definitely not Denonite. If she had to guess, she would wager that the statue had come from one of the lost tribes, the ones that the Denonites had conquered early in their reign on Amnthra.
“Gabrielle,” said Yusef Kimber, one of the best archeologists on her crew, “you have to get out of there. You’re fifteen minutes past time.”
Fifteen minutes past time. A time she had established, based on her own research. She hadn’t allowed the medical doctor down here to do his own estimates.
So far, only she and Yusef even knew the caverns existed.
She didn’t trust the rest of her team. If she told anyone else, they’d
tell the graduate students, the post-docs, and the hangers-on who were digging out the ancient city.
Once those people knew, this place would be overrun with thieves, thrill seekers, and treasure hunters, not to mention journalists and art historians, who would want to see all this evidence of wars in the Lost Age.
“Gabrielle,” Yusef said.
“All right,” she said, letting the exasperation into her voice.
She reached into the niche and carefully grabbed the statue. It felt like it was made of ice, even though she knew it wasn’t.
Her breath caught.
It was lovely—and she was right. It wasn’t Denonite. It came from a completely different culture, one she hadn’t seen outside of historical texts.
She waved her other hand at Yusef so that he could come down and take the statue. They hadn’t found as much in the niches as she expected. Not all the niches were full. But enough of them were that she was convinced an entire treasure trove had once existed here.
The water posed the greatest problem. She knew they weren’t very deep in the caverns. The flooding had probably taken artifacts and moved them out of their protective holes.
She could only hope that it hadn’t ruined them as well.
Yusef wrapped the statue in protective covering and put it into his pack. They’d been storing everything in a hidden part of the building that covered the entrance to the caverns.
Soon she would have to move the items. She was preparing a nearby temple so that she could clean and identify them. Mostly, she planned to work alone.
But if she did bring in some of the other members of her team, she would tell them the items had come from the ground or the buildings inside the city, not from the caverns.
The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack Page 3