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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Dan Simmons, whose novels range from science fiction to thrillers, talks about the feebleness of today's "serious" fiction and what we can all learn from Tom Wolfe.
Feb 27, 2002 | Not many writers appeal to both mainstream and genre audiences, but ever since "Song of Kali" -- a thriller deemed moody enough to qualify as horror -- won a World Fantasy Award in 1986, Dan Simmons has found himself with a foot in both camps. Three years after that-- all in the course of a single year -- Simmons published an epic horror novel that won a Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association ("Carrion Comfort"), the first of four science fiction novels that take on the themes of poet John Keats while dishing out plenty of space opera action ("Hyperion," which was awarded a Hugo from the SF crowd) and "Phases of Gravity," a mainstream novel that centers around the midlife crisis of an ex-astronaut.
In a 1991 speech at the MileHiCon, a convention of genre writers, Simmons exhorted his peers to blend their bold plots with the serious themes and high-quality prose often found in literary fiction. He urged his colleagues to create their own equivalents of such classics as "The Great Gatsby," "Daniel Martin" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and to "have them accepted by the same standards of excellence which apply throughout the literary world."
Simmons' oeuvre is a melting pot. In "The Hollow Man," he mixes SF-style telekinetics with horrific set pieces straight out of Dante's "Inferno"; "Fires of Eden" combines historical romance with comedic horror; "Looking for Kelly Dahl," a novella, is an afterlife fantasy that features some vibrant writing about nature (drawing on Simmons' 18 years as a teacher); and his latest, "A Winter Haunting," is a mix of Jamesian spookiness and Alfred Hitchcock thrills. Through it all, Simmons' crisp, unfettered prose keeps the narrative pace moving briskly along. Recently, Salon spoke with Simmons, at his home in Colorado, about such topics as the state of both genre and "serious" (literary) fiction, the bout of depression that figured in the writing of his latest novel and what it's like to live between two literary worlds.
The speech you gave in Stony Brook, N.Y., in 1991, challenged genre writers to tear down the wall between genre and mainstream fiction over the course of the following decade. How do you think they fared? Did the genres of SF and horror succeed in tearing down the "wall" between genre and mainstream?
That talk, delivered in slightly different form in Colorado that year at the MileHiCon writer's convention, was meant to be a stirring, Kennedy-esque, "we choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard" challenge to my fellow SF and genre writers. No one really noticed the speech, much less took it seriously.
But there were a couple of points from that passionately earnest speech that should be clarified and perhaps reiterated. When I spoke of tearing down the wall between genre and mainstream, I meant it in terms of SF and other genres not making the mistake of establishing separate but equal criteria for excellence -- not lowering standards, not judging their beloved genre fiction by segregated rules of quality.
Also, when I talked about the wall between mainstream fiction and genre fiction as a rift between the "heirs of Robert Louis Stevenson and the heirs of Henry James" (close friends and admirers of one another's work before genre boundaries and anti-genre snobberies were born), I wasn't suggesting that genre fiction was the sad ghetto; on the contrary, my analogy was to divided Berlin in the Cold War, with mainstream fiction having become too much like East Berlin -- gray, joyless, lifeless, hierarchical, with its store shelves empty or stocked with a few Party-approved items that no one wanted to buy. I suggested that the color, energy, vitality and ongoing party of West Berlin -- the energetic genres -- needed to kick down the wall and bring some life back to the East Berlin of contemporary serious fiction.
Has it happened since 1991? Not really. SF has become more socially acceptable through sheer attrition -- its readers, largely Baby Boomers, have grown older and more affluent and can afford hardcover books now, so some of the social stigma of reading (and writing) SF has faded. Horror solved its ghetto problem through the simple act of destroying its own genre -- greedy publishers, sloppy editors and lazy writers producing so much junk and in such quantities that "Gresham's Law" kicked into effect. The bad drove out the good. Then the whole genre imploded. Seen any horror sections in major bookstores lately? But just as many species of trees, shrubs and wildlife flourish after a major fire burns away the old-growth forest, so this self-immolation of horror has led to new writers (and some old) coming back to the fields and hillsides of horror fiction, made more fertile by the flames and ash.
