by Dave Slusher
DS: Especially with Jaime's work. He seems to go after the same kind of subculture that you write about.
PZB: I don't remember exactly who did which work, but I like all of the Love and Rockets that I've read. I just glanced through Birdland, and the sex didn't seem so exciting. I was mad because there was already a comic called Birdland. It has no resemblance to the comic in my book whatsoever.
DS: Which underground comics figures were inspirations for Bobby McGee? Art Speigleman's work seems similar to what he was doing in the book.
PZB: I can see that, yeah. I wasn't specifically thinking of him, but I've been reading underground comics for so long and liking so many different artists that what turned up in the story was a distillation of everything that I had read that I liked. One of the sparks of inspiration for Drawing Blood was when I read Chester Brown's graphic novel, Ed the Happy Clown. I can't trace the direct line from that story to mine, but something went off in my brain when I read it, just realizing that something like that could exist in the world. Once in a while, I get these flashes where I realize that the world is even weirder than I thought it was, and I really like that. That was one of the things that made me feel it very strongly.
DS: And if you look at the work he did in it, over 2 years one month at a time, around page 40 he became brilliant and the work hit a new level. That gives us all hope that we can get that good at something that quickly.
PZB: Chester is great. I've invited him to my signing at Toronto. I sure hope he shows up.
DS: What is the book you are working on now?
PZB: It started out as the tale of the torrid affair between two cannibalistic serial killers, and that's still a big part of the plot, but all sorts of other things have gotten in there as well. I talked about the neural interfacing. It has HIV positive terrorism, pirate radio, Vietnamese-American culture in New Orleans. It has all sorts of things. It's going to take some research, but I think it's going to be a fun story. I'm considering something unheard of for me, working from an embryonic outline this time. I've never done that before. My method of plotting has been to barrel on through and see what happens. This is going to be more of a suspenseful, plot-driven story. I'm thinking about seeing what an outline can do for me. It might be different for a change.
Emma Bull Introduction
Emma Bull has a distinction of excellence with regards to all the interviews done for Reality Break. She more than any other guest seems to take the act of being interviewed very seriously. This is not to say she is dour or doesn't sound like she's having fun—in fact, she sounds on tape like she's having a blast. Note here that I can't claim to have any special access to her thought processes or motivations—all of this is supposition on my part, and is in my opinion only. What it seems like is that no matter what question I asked her, every time she was a guest, she made the assumption that there was a question worth answering in there somewhere. Even if my question seemed dumb (or really was dumb), she would work to find the nugget of interest. Whether that meant restating it or answering a similar but slightly refocussed version of it, by the time she replied the question was not dumb at all. Let me tell you, my friends, for a talk show interviewer, guests like that are better than gold. God knows there have been moments where I'd have traded a dozen of the guest I had for one Emma Bull.
An interesting fact about Ms. Bull is that she was a formative influence on my growth from a fannish teenager to an SF insider (or whatever it would be that I am.) The Atlanta Fantasy Fair in the mid 80's was the premiere Georgia science fiction and comic book convention. I attended them all while I lived in Augusta, Georgia and later when I attended Georgia Tech. One year, she, her husband, Will Shetterly, and Steven Brust were all guests. I attended several panels that some or all of them were on, and they really impressed me. They all seemed so smart and witty and funny. During the con, I bought several of their books, including some of the Liavek anthologies, and novels from each of the three. They had a table for their publishing outfit, Steeldragon Press. I came by several times when I would look, but was too shy to actually walk up and talk to them. Finally I gathered the courage to approach them. I recall vividly Steve Brust looking at me like I was crazed and rabid, while Emma and Will were smiling and polite. They were giving away copies of Captain Confederacy, one of my favorite comics of that time. I mentioned that I already had all the issues in the series, so Will and Emma dug through their stuff until they found an old issue of a mini-comic they put out and gave that to me. I still have it.
The point of this whole story is that to my teenage self, Emma Bull and her posse seemed so cool, like they were having such a good time that I wanted to be like that. It never occurred to me then that within a few years I could be having conversations with her about her work and, moreover, that she would be mining for gold in the silt and sand of my end of that conversation. It just goes to show that truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction.
Emma Bull
This interview was recorded over the phone with Emma in Minneapolis, Minnesota in April 1994.
DS: The interview began with her discussing the Borderlands series.
EB: Terri Windling was the editor for the anthologies: Borderlands, Bordertown, and Life On The Border, in which, well, the setting is a place that she made up, which is a world in which it's a little bit in the future and the elflands, the lands of Faerie, have come back from wherever it was that they disappeared to, after they appeared in all of those folksongs and legends and things. They're not here now, so they must've gone someplace, so now they're back. Humans can't get into the elflands, but they can get into the area on the border, called, obviously enough, “The Borderland". There magic works and human science works but both of them work intermittently and it's become a magnet for runaway kids, kind of the way New York City is, or London, or any of those places that kids run away to. It's also, interestingly enough, a magnet for runaway elf kids, who are likewise dissatisfied with the culture they live in, their lives, or whatever. So, it's a setting that pretty much allows for almost any kind of story you want to tell; and Terri asked my husband Will Shetterly and I to write her a story for the second anthology, Bordertown, and we came up with a couple of characters that we used in that story who we had a lot of fun with. We like that. So Will turned around and wrote a couple of novels using one of his characters set there, and I watched him do this and he was having a lot of fun, and I got really jealous, and I said “Enough of this! I'm writing my own Bordertown novel. So there!” So, that was what Finder was. It's got a few of the characters that we wrote for the Bordertown anthology, and it was great fun. That's sort of the background of how I came to write it.
DS: Tell us a little about the plot and the things specific to your novel.
EB: Ah, you don't want to hear about the plot of a book! Plots always sound dumb when you tell'em to people.
DS: Okay, we'll skip the plot.
EB: I can do it, but they do sound dumb, you know. [laughs] Imagine trying to explain the plot of one of the Foundation novels or The Stars My Destination. It sounds dumb.
DS: [laughs] Okay, so you've set yourself up as an unresponsive witness now.
EB: No, no. Just honest. Actually, okay. The shorthand of the plot is invoking runaways again. We've got a character who ran away from home because he had a lot of trouble because he was weird. Not just the usual kind of weirdness. I mean, all high school kids don't fit in. It's part of the process of evolving as a human being, I think. But he was a human being with a fey talent. He could find things for people. If you had lost something, you would come and tell him that, uh, you've lost your car keys, and he would go with you and he would look around until he found your car keys. And he could always do it. And after people got over thinking, “Wow, that's neat,” they started thinking, “Uh, that's kinda weird. I don't know about this guy.” And he had a lot of trouble, so he runs away. The book is part coming-of-age novel and part police procedural, because he ends up being recruited by what passes fo
r the police in Bordertown to help this cop solve a problem. In the course of it, he ends up coming to terms with what he does, and who he is.
DS: Now see, that doesn't sound dumb at all. That sounds great.
EB: [laughs] Yeah, well, I sort of doctored it up a little.
DS: The setting that you have interests me. I like any setting like this. I remember First Comics, they had the fractured, multidimensional city of Cynosure.
EB: Oh, yeah.
DS: Already you've got a very chaotic environment. Does that give you more leeway to do anything that you want? Here you have a mystery inside this setting.
EB: I tend to think that any really good setting allows for the same range of stories that you get in real life, though I confess that my favorite of the Bordertown stories are the ones that don't actually have very much magic and action in them at all. I think my favorite is called “Mockery” and I think it's by Bellamy Bach and Ellen Kushner. It's a story of four kids of various elf and human backgrounds and the lies that they tell to each other, and the fronts that they put up to try to convince people that they're more important than they are, and in the process lose track of what the things are about them that really are important. The magic is beside the point in that. So, this setting really does allow you to do just practically anything. I mean, if you want to write a J.D. Salinger novel set in Bordertown, it seems to be something you can do. I think that's kind of a measure of the quality of the setting—not so much “chaotic” as “full of possibility".
DS: With this book having the mystery structure, there are a few of the basic conventions of any mystery story. Anytime you have a civilian dectective, to some extent they have to resemble an episode of “Murder, She Wrote". Why are you there? And you have specific ways of addressing this that you wouldn't normally have in a mystery story. I'm thinking of the compulsive nature of the “finding". Does that in its own way “make” the story? It brings to the story a logic it wouldn't otherwise have.
EB: Well, there's that. There is the magical logic of this kid's talent. There's also what I got to do with, nobody had much explored the whole principle of the police in Bordertown before. That was sort of the section that I cut out. Part of what gave me the freedom to introduce things like a non-cop investigating this, was that I imagined the structure of law enforcement in Bordertown as being, well, not very structured at all. I thought, “Okay, this is a town that kind of exists almost accidentally. But it's come together simply because it's the best jumping-off point either to the [human] world or to the world of Faerie. And so it kind of exists in that restless frontier-town fashion. It's not as if there's a police academy; it's not as if this is a group of people who have to answer to any other law enforcement body. They're pretty much cut off from all of the rest of the world of this, either whatever passes for law in the elflands, or in the human world. And yet how does society deal with [people] who just, no matter what you do, are going to make life difficult for their fellow people? One of the responses to that, not necessarily the best one or the only one, is to come up with a group of people who enforce the law. Figuring out what form that would take in Bordertown, if it would have a form, exactly, at all, was great fun. That was my chance to kind of look at the police from the inside out. What are the things that you really have to have if you are the police? What are the things that people just assume “this is the way police behave"? So that was part of my excuse for throwing in some of the plot devices of mystery and being able to say, “Yes, but look, I have this other reason for it!”
DS: Was it tough to kind of walk the line between having the police be ineffectual and completely authoritarian?
EB: Um, yeah. I grew up as a nice suburban kid being told that if you got lost, that you could ask the police to help you find your parents and your house and whatever, and they would do that and that was part of their job. And that is warring with me now as an adult, looking at the way that too many individual officers and too many police departments see their job. As I was writing the book I discovered that one of the things that bothered me about law enforcement as it exists now is that there seems to be a feeling among a lot of police officers that, if they catch somebody, they must be guilty. Their job is not to bring in suspects, or stop people from hurting each other. Their job is to find the person who is guilty and make sure they're punished. So the separation between the police and the legal system is getting very fuzzy. One of the things that I wanted was an idealistic woman who thought that her job was to be a cop, but she wasn't certain what that meant, and she was trying to rebuild it from scratch. And that was my opportunity to find out what *I* thought a cop did. Yeah, it's a tough line to walk, okay, heck, it's a tougher line to walk to be a cop and to be an honest cop, and to figure out where your job begins and ends. And so, messing with it in fiction was just another really good way to examine that.
DS: Let's talk a little about your life as a musician.
EB: Okay.
DS: You're in several groups. Are they both concurrent? You're in Cats Laughing and The Flash Girls.
EB: Yep, and they're both going. For a while, we were saying that Cats Laughing was on “indefinite hiatus". Cats Laughing, by the way, is Steven Brust on drums, another fantasy author that your listeners may very well recognize, Adam Stempel, who is also the lead guitarist and singer for Boiled In Lead now; and Lojo Russo, Frank Runyon, and me. How many people was that?
DS: I think we're up to six.
EB: No, there are five people. Okay, and that's Cats Laughing as it is constituted now. For the longest time we said, “No, no, Cats Laughing is no more,” and then we began to play. We were playing very much amplified and electric and we started getting more and more acoustic, and we discovered that we're kind of a folk-jazz band, acoustically, and it was a lot more fun, and we had less equipment to carry to gigs and that's kind of rejuvenated us, so we're back on the track. And The Flash Girls is myself on guitar and vocals and Lorraine Garland playing the fiddle and singing, and we put out our first cd kind of the tail end of last year.
DS: And the name of that is “The Return of—
EB: The Return of Pansy Smith and Violet Jones.
DS: Okay.
EB: And we've got some songs on there with lyrics by Neil Gaiman, and an afterword by Neil Gaiman, and some songs by me, and songs by Lorraine, and great fun.
DS: Now you also have kind of an intersection between your music as you write it and your books, and you've written books about music and also the music from your books are on albums you've done.
EB: [laughs] That's true. That's true. I mean, never let anything go to waste, you know.
DS: So which end do you enjoy more? I mean, I guess that “enjoying more” is not exactly correct.
EB: Yeah, it's a different kind of critter. The wonderful thing about the music, that makes it so much fun is, that, in a band or in a duo, it's a collaborative meeting. You get to work with other people who are doing what you're doing. You get to establish some kind of creative dialogue. That's really satisfying. It makes you go back and work harder. It's also kind of nice to be able to do what you do right there in front of people and get the immediate feedback. As an author, you work by yourself and you don't find out what anybody thought of the book until well after they think it. Whereas, if you perform a song right in front of somebody, they laugh at the good lines, they applaud afterwards, you know, you're right there. You get to see what their face does when you play it for them. But the writing is a longer, more sustained effort, and you don't have the drawbacks of collaboration. You don't have any sense that, “Well, okay, okay, we need to showcase everybody; we need to make the compromises to make everybody happy. It's just you, and your computer or your typewriter, or your pen. You get to say what you think; right there, in private, nobody looking over your shoulder. And then afterward you get to go back, at leisure, and say, “Now, did I really mean to say that?”
DS: You've worked in several different shared worlds situations with this
and also with the Liavek books. Is it kind of a bridge between the isolation of writing and the collaboration of music? Here you're writing in isolation but you've also got people in there with you, throwing in characters and ideas.
EB: Yeah, and it's a relatively painless way to collaborate, because you're not really cross-checking sentences with people as much. You're just kind of picking up on things that people develop and kind of running with them in your direction—with their permission, of course. You've still got the freedom to write the story the way you want it, but you've also got the fun of finding things that people have already written or created. They're kind of left lying there for you to use, and you come around the corner and discover “Bingo!” exactly the thing that I needed for that scene. This person has already set up this interaction with this dreadful camel or whatever it is. There is a dreadful camel in the first Lliavek anthology that runs through kind of a lot of stories. We had a lot of fun with that.
DS: You've written across several different genres. You've written science fiction, you've written fantasy. Do you get different things from each sort of genre?
EB: Good question. On a kind of a small-scale sense, yes. I always have fun putting in kind of contemporary, topical references; I always have fun putting in references to movies and things like that. You can do that in near-future science fiction, though in science fiction set very far in the future, the idea that people would be paying any attention to the music that we think is important, or the movies that we think are important, is kind of far-fetched, because popular culture just keeps barreling onward at a breakneck speed. Unless you actually throw a roadblock in its way. You've got to assume that the popular culture that you're writing about in further future science fiction is going to be almost unrecognizable. Fantasy, obviously, unless it's contemporary fantasy set in this world, you're not going to be able to do that kind of cultural reference. But that's pretty small scale. As far as what fantasy or science fiction can do, like the really big parts of what you can do in fiction, what each one of them provides is really pretty much the same. I suspect it is not significantly different from what any kind of fiction provides. This is going to sound like I'm being hoity-toity and saying “No, no, no. I don't write that genre fiction", because I do write genre fiction, and I read it, and I love it, but I don't really think of myself as writing it necessarily on purpose.