Raising Hell
Page 8
Speaking of France, you’ve lived in Paris longer than in New York, your original briar patch. How did that come about? How does a kid from the Bronx become not only a Parisian but a player in the arts and literary scene there?
Way back in the 1970s in Los Angeles, I got a call from Peter Fitting, an academic interested in SF, who told me that Richard Pinhas, a French musician who had named his band Heldon after the fictitious country in The Iron Dream and his wife Agnetta were coming through LA and wanted to meet me.
I said okay, but not without some trepidation on the part of myself and Dona, since fans of The Iron Dream might turn out to be neo-Nazis. They didn’t. Instead they became friends, close friends for decades.
After Dona and I moved back to New York, and eventually broke up for several decades, I was Guest of Honor at a major SF conference in Metz.
I discovered that I had a literary and political reputation in France thanks to the French publication of Bug Jack Barron. So I did radio and TV in my primitive French, made more friends, etc. And started going to France for weeks at a time.
During one of those trips, my musician friend Richard—who just about invented electronic rock and ambient computer music before he or any other musicians even had computers—asked me to write a simple lyric and record two cuts as a singer on his forthcoming album East/West.
I told him I was no singer. He told me not to worry, I would sing through a vocoder. So in France, I became a cyborged singer, which much later became the inspiration for Little Heroes.
Much later, I visited Paris on vacation with my then wife, novelist N. Lee Wood. She had never been to France, and we both fell in love with the city. I had long fantasized about living in Paris but was reluctant to move there alone. But now was the time to do it.
This was early-to-mid Glasnost days, and I was inspired to get a contract to write Russian Spring, which despite the title is largely set in Paris, and I spent a year there writing it. By the time the novel was finished (after a trip to Moscow, which despite the title, we had to do in the Russian winter) the Berlin Wall was coming down, and we were culturally connected and decided to stay.
Lee and I eventually divorced, and I decided to stay in France where I was a literary lion, half-assed not-quite-rock star, occasional political commentator, sometime screenwriter, and eventually even involved in the gallery and museum art scene, writing exhibition catalog copy. Invited to literary and SF events all over Europe.
Like Utopiales, in Nantes. It was a treat for me to get to rub shoulders with European SF legends like you and Brian Aldiss and Christopher Priest.
And bend elbows as well. The French tradition of the open literary bar helps.
Eventually I reconnected with Dona Sadock, who lived with me in Paris for two years or so after 9/11 (which we experienced pretty damn close in New York City) until real estate and monetary complications forced our exile to New York, where we now live together as I write this.
But we still spend three or four months a year in France.
Wouldn’t you?
To quote Dylan again, “Honey, do you have to ask?”
In your famous Woody Allen interview (in which he ends up interviewing you!) you said you felt more “culturally connected” in France. Is that because they have the crazy idea that SF is actually Literature?
Partly, I suppose, it’s because my writings are considered literature, not SF in general. But it goes deeper than that. In France, literature, art, and film are more culturally central than in the U.S. Every little village wants to do some event that puts it on the cultural map, and is willing to spend money to do it. The French Ministry of Culture, combined with the Foreign Ministry, has sent me to Mexico and New Caledonia, in effect as a cultural emissary of France, not the USA. The French Consulate in New Orleans was a great help to me and my video biographer Ben Abrass in doing research for my novel Police State.
I wrote a commissioned article for Le Monde about all this, called “The French Exception.” When there were commercial negotiations between the U.S. and the French, Hollywood kept insisting that France’s subsidy of its film industry violated “free trade” rules. The French in effect told them to get stuffed. Because film is an art, a part of the national cultural patrimony, and any civilized country of course must regard that as more important than mere commerce.
And France still sticks to that position.
The U.S. doesn’t even have a Ministry of Culture. It has “endowments” of the arts and of the humanities (NEA, NEH).
And neither is a cabinet position. All that makes a difference. As I think I more or less said in the Woody Allen dialog, when you’re a writer in France and you walk into a bank, you’re at least an artist if not a celebrity. When you’re a writer who walks into a bank in the U.S., you’re an unemployed bum.
Speaking of unemployed bums, you have been president of SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) twice, and also president of World SF. And you were a Guest of Honor at Worldcon in 2013. Does all this mean that you have a political as well as literary agenda? Are there changes you want to see made in the way writers are treated (or treat themselves)?
Well, being Guest of Honor at a Worldcon, or for that matter at any SF convention, and being on panels and such, I don’t regard as having a political agenda. That sort of thing is literary on the one hand, and PR or promotional on another—and of philosophical, scientific, personal interest on yet another, if we can allow three hands.
In SF three hands are allowed.
But being president of anything is, of course, ipso facto a political role, and therefore to one degree or another, successful or not, involves championing some sort of “political agenda”—though not necessarily what the French call “politique politicienne,” meaning more or less party politics or pursuit of a political career. My agenda was mostly about making writers’ associations more professional.
But while I’m being French about it, I do admit to being “engagé” as a writer. That’s hard to define in English; it sort of means the opposite of “apolitical,” meaning that I, or at least my characters, often do have their political agendas, which I may or may not agree with, and the stories can and do sometimes turn on specific political conflicts—the outcomes of which can and usually do reflect my own political stance on the matters at issue.
However, I try not to be didactic when writing fiction. When I want to address political matters, I do so directly, as in “The Abnormal New Normal” in this very book. And I think doing that keeps me from turning my fiction into political screeds.
Finally, I, like any other writer, am also a citizen of something; and as a citizen, I’ve been politically engaged since I was maybe as young as six or seven. My family was politically engaged to the point where mornings were spent in an intricate dance of getting done in the bathroom, eating breakfast, and passing around the morning newspaper, then talking about it over breakfast, schedules permitting, so that the kids and the adults could start the day up-to-date on the news.
From a Democrat or Republican perspective?
Labor, all the way. I was told early on that ladies and gentlemen do not cross picket lines unless they have a damn good exceptional reason. And when at the age of no more than seven, when I asked Jimmy Hauser, a virtual uncle and committed Communist, for something that would give me an overall picture, he handed me H.G. Wells’s Outline of History.
One more question. As a New Yorker, born and raised, how do you like the city these days?
Not so much. I don’t like being in New York, first because it feels isolated from the wider and more diverse worlds of Europe. I don’t like being in New York because it’s the capital of the U.S. publishing industry, which has pretty much blackballed me for nearly a decade, resulting in four novels published or being published in France, but none in the USA. And after fifteen years in France, I have many more friends there than remain in New York. New York is also monstrously expensive to live in.
As the son
g goes “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.” But doesn’t that mean that it’s easier to make it anywhere else?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Series
Second Starfaring Age
1. The Void Captain’s Tale (1982)
2. Child of Fortune (1985)
Novels
The Solarians (1966)
Agent of Chaos (1967)
The Men in the Jungle (1967)
Bug Jack Barron (1969)
The Iron Dream (1972)
Passing through the Flame (1975)
Riding the Torch (1978)
A World Between (1979)
The Mind Game (1980)
Songs from the Stars (1980)
The Mind Game (1983)
Little Heroes (1987)
Russian Spring (1991)
The Children of Hamelin (1991)
Deus X (1992)
Vampire Junkies (1994)
Pictures at Eleven (1994)
Journal of the Plague Years (1995)
Greenhouse Summer (1998)
He Walked Among Us (2003)
The Druid King (2003)
Mexica (2005)
Osama the Gun (2010)
Welcome to Your Dreamtime (2012)
Police State (2014)
Collections
The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde (1970)
Threads of Time: Three Original Novellas of Science Fiction (1974) (with Gregory Benford and Clifford D. Simak)
No Direction Home (1975)
The Star-Spangled Future (1979)
Other Americas (1988)
Deus X and Other Stories (2003)
Anthologies edited by Spinrad
The New Tomorrows (1971)
Modern Science Fiction (1974)
Nonfiction
Staying Alive: A Writer’s Guide (1983)
Experiment Perilous: Three Essays on Science Fiction (1983) (with Alfred Bester and Marion Zimmer Bradley)
Science Fiction in the Real World (1990)
Anthologies containing stories by Spinrad
Dangerous Visions 3 (1967)
One Hundred Years of Science Fiction (1968)
Best SF Stories from New Worlds (1969)
The Best Science Fiction of the Year (1972)
Nova 3 (1973)
Nebula Award Stories 9 (1974)
The Best of Analog (1978)
Countdown to Midnight: Twelve Great Stories about Nuclear War (1984)
Full Spectrum (1988)
Full Spectrum 3 (1991)
The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories (1992)
The Playboy Book of Science Fiction (1998)
Year’s Best SF 4 (1999)
Short Stories
“The Last of the Romany” (1963)
“The Equalizer” (1964)
“The Ersatz Ego” (1964)
“Outward Bound” (1964)
“The Rules of the Road” (1964)
“Subjectivity” (1964)
“A Child of Mind” (1965)
“Deathwatch” (1965)
“The Age of Invention” (1966)
“Technicality” (1966)
“Carcinoma Angels” (1967)
“It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane!” (1967)
“A Night in Elf Hill” (1968)
“The Big Flash” (1969) Nebula nominee
“The Conspiracy” (1969)
“Dead End” (1969)
“The Entropic Gang Bang Caper” (1969)
“Heroes Die But Once” (1969)
“The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde” (1969)
“Once More, with Feeling” (1969)
“The Lost Continent” (1970)
“Neutral Ground” (1970)
“The Weed of Time” (1970)
“No Direction Home” (1971)
“Heirloom” (1972)
“All the Sounds of the Rainbow” (1973)
“The National Pastime” (1973)
“A Thing of Beauty” (1973) Nebula nominee
“In the Eye of the Storm” (1974)
“Riding the Torch” (1974) Hugo nominee
“Save the Giant Flying Vampire Toad” (1980)
“Journals of the Plague Years” (1988) Hugo and Nebula nominee
“The Helping Hand” (1991)
“The Year of the Mouse” (1998)
“A Man of the Theatre” (2005)
“The Brown Revolution” (2008)
“Where No Man Pursueth” (2010)
“The Silver Bullet and the Golden Goose” (2010)
“Out There” (2011)
“Far Distant Suns” (2013)
THE AUTHOR IN 199 WORDS
NORMAN SPINRAD HAS BEEN a radio talk show host, songwriter, performer, recording artist, literary agent, president of a couple of writers’ organizations, underground journalist, film critic, political commentator, blogger, literary critic, art commentator, world traveler, and interviewer. He cooks quite a bit and rather well, and is a pretty good photographer, a pretty lousy painter, and a somewhat better sculptor.
In addition to these interests he has, over a half century, managed to find time to write several television scripts, two produced feature films (screwed up by would-be auteur directors), a book of literary criticism, a book of collected political essays, a book of practical advice to writers, and is slowly working on a cookbook.
In addition, he has written twenty some odd novels, including Bug Jack Barron, The Iron Dream, Songs from the Stars, The Void Captain’s Tale, He Walked Among Us, Russian Spring, Pictures at 11, Mexica, Osama the Gun, Welcome to Your Dreamtime, Police State, The Men in the Jungle, Agent of Chaos, Passing through the Flame, The Children of Hamelin, Greenhouse Summer, and Child of Fortune, and sixty or seventy short stories translated into something like twenty languages, not all of which have been identified.
These are indisputably momentous times— the financial system is melting down globally and the Empire is stumbling. Now more than ever there is a vital need for radical ideas.
In the six years since its founding—and on a mere shoestring—PM Press has risen to the formidable challenge of publishing and distributing knowledge and entertainment for the struggles ahead. With over 250 releases to date, we have published an impressive and stimulating array of literature, art, music, politics, and culture. Using every available medium, we’ve succeeded in connecting those hungry for ideas and information to those putting them into practice.
Friends of PM allows you to directly help impact, amplify, and revitalize the discourse and actions of radical writers, filmmakers, and artists. It provides us with a stable foundation from which we can build upon our early successes and provides a much-needed subsidy for the materials that can’t necessarily pay their own way. You can help make that happen—and receive every new title automatically delivered to your door once a month—by joining as a Friend of PM Press. And, we’ll throw in a free T-shirt when you sign up.
Here are your options:
• $30 a month: Get all books and pamphlets plus 50% discount on all webstore purchases
• $40 a month: Get all PM Press releases (including CDs and DVDs) plus 50% discount on all webstore purchases
• $100 a month: Superstar—Everything plus PM merchandise, free downloads, and 50% discount on all webstore purchases
For those who can’t afford $30 or more a month, we’re introducing Sustainer Rates at $15, $10, and $5. Sustainers get a free PM Press T-shirt and a 50% discount on all purchases from our website.
Your Visa or Mastercard will be billed once a month, until you tell us to stop. Or until our efforts succeed in bringing the revolution around. Or the financial meltdown of Capital makes plastic redundant. Whichever comes first.
PM Press was founded at the end of 2007 by a small collection of folks with decades of publishing, media, and organizing experience. PM Press co-conspirators have published and distributed hundreds of books, pamphlets, CDs, and DVDs. Members of PM have founded enduring book fairs,
spearheaded victorious tenant organizing campaigns, and worked closely with bookstores, academic conferences, and even rock bands to deliver political and challenging ideas to all walks of life. We’re old enough to know what we’re doing and young enough to know what’s at stake.
We seek to create radical and stimulating fiction and non-fiction books, pamphlets, t-shirts, visual and audio materials to entertain, educate, and inspire you. We aim to distribute these through every available channel with every available technology—whether that means you are seeing anarchist classics at our bookfair stalls; reading our latest vegan cookbook at the café; downloading geeky fiction e-books; or digging new music and timely videos from our website.
PM Press is always on the lookout for talented and skilled volunteers, artists, activists, and writers to work with. If you have a great idea for a project or can contribute in some way, please get in touch.
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland CA 94623
510-658-3906
www.pmpress.org