We've met the enemy, and they are us...

Interview with Dan Simmons, Copenhagen, 19 nov 1999

Intro
The narrow path of recognition
Simmons world
Uncertain truth
Melting view of the world
Outside interview

Intro

The American science fiction heavyweight Dan Simmons visited the annual Copenhagen Book Fair. Earlier same year, the final volume of his mammoth work Hyperion was published in Denmark, and now it was time for The Crooc Factory, a spy novel on Hemingway. Here is what a Danish science fiction author got out of Simmons, and vice versa.

DS = Dan Simmons
HL = H. H. Løyche

Simmons radiated a professionel obligingeness, making me feel at ease as soon as I entered the room. Seeming straightforward at first, I was nevertheless soon to track the scent of indefinable complexity about him, that is so often shared by unusual intellects. Had I been asked to guess his profession for instance, he might as well have been an architect or an university headmaster, as an author. Much to my surprise, I discovered it all came close to the truth. While using three to four minutes on collegue gossip and coffe our conversation was already so easygoing, we almost forgot the interview. But a queue of journalists waited outside the door, so we had to come down to business.

HL - As a novelist, I'm almost ashamed to bother you with the usual questions. But there is one issue, I guess the readers like to know about. What made you write?

DS - I really did like most crazy young, wannabee writers. I have no idea where the urge came from, except from my reading. But I knew I wanted to write, not simply to my own satisfaction. After several frustrating years, it crystalised in 1981, when I had to accept, that the magazine who could have published my stories had turned in. So I gave up trying to write, to make up with the frustrating years. But then I went to a congress, and met Harlan Ellison. He read one of my pieces and gave me a speach. He said: "The cricial difference on those who can write, and thos who think they can, is weather they hear the music.". He believed I could and if I didn't try to be published, he'd come back and do physical damage to me. He's a scary person, so I took him seriously.

HL - Is it a hint, suggesting that your idea of becoming a writer, perhaps a well known writer, was a bit spoiled by your interest in ... actually, writing good literature?

DS - No. I think it helped me. The few pieces of advise I have for beginning writers is: Don't set your goals so low. So many beginning writers say, well, I wonna write like this or that popular writer, who is barely literate. You can probably write that way, at least copy the diction - that's why he is so popular. But I really admire good writers, and I kept comparing what I was writing to the writers I loved. I fell far short - and I still fall quite short - but at least I set my goals high enough, so when it was time to try to get published, it was high enough to cross that treshold. And what the average beginning writer does not understand, is the great abyss between the skilled amateur writer and those who are accepted for publication. I don't mean to be arrogant, but it really means quite a difference. To me it's like the idea of building a house all by yourself, and doing it for real.

HL - You've got to be a bricklayer, a carpenter, an electrician ...

DS - Plummer. Even the architect. Every single room you have to design from scratch. That sounds arrogant, but you see, in USA, out of 250 million people, I think 230 millions wants to write a book. The average statement from somebody at a party is, that person says: Oh - you're a writer. I'm gonna write a book some day. Whenever I get a little time, away from the real world and my real job. Everybody probably does have a story to write. But I'm tired of people talking about it, without knowing what it is like. And I'm sure you are as well, being a writer yourself.

HL - Exactly. If you don't work on it every single day, it leads to nothing. Now is the time to write. Otherwise: Forget it.

DS - Absolutely. And that is why I'm envious a bit of young people who have the courage to go out and live in the world, but they newer loose sight of the goal, when they decide to become a writer. I was a school teacher for hyper intelligent children for eighteen years, and I loved it. On the plus-side it gave me a kind of experience of enough life, so I had things to write about. But I had an about ten years gap there, where I could have been working every day as a writer, and I wasn't. So I don't take people seriously, who put in a little bit of effort in writing.

The narrow path of recognition

HL - Talking about taking literature serious ... In 1960 Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier wrote, that we, in the extensive and stunning literature called 'science fiction', sense a spirit, who has put youth behind and unfolds in a format, suitable for our planet, begins considerations at cosmic level and resettles humanity's fate in the huge universe. But a study of such a literature, which in many ways reminds us of the verbal tradition, known from storytellers of the antiquity and the Middel Ages, and witness the deep concerns of an ambitious intelligence, sociologists consider below their dignity. How do you feel about, that this remains unchanged after forty years?

DS - I get frustrated, because SF has so much to offer. Whatever science fiction may be, it serves an important purpose for the readers. The conflics SF takes up, and the way it is done, are important to you, me, and everyone, but exceeds the intellect of the critics. In USA SF grew out of pulp magazines loaded with various cheap fiction, and many believes it still resembles that history. It is faulty, not just because SF really has the best characters, focusing on deep questions of the human heart. SF often takes up more important conflicts, and with deeper insights, than other literature. And SF does not nurish the superficial, almost mindless exhibition of the human heart, like most other genres do. 

At least in America, so much of the 'serious' fiction has become so small, so claustrofobic overwhelming, at least in the USA, that everything else is repressed. John Updike referred to it as becoming small enough and inky enough to be considered as serious writers. As one of the very few new wave writers you, together with Brian Aldiss and James Ballard, posess more experience in style, language, and psychology, even though this postmodern genre came out of the 70'ies. I believe most literature could learn a lot from your form of experimenting realism. Regrettably, that sort of SF is tremendously difficult to master, and the critics doesn't comprehend it at all.

On the other hand, the diction of most SF and fantastic - fantasy especially - is rigid and old fashioned. For me that works, because the more complex a story is, the simpler the style should be. The simpler the actual story, the more stylish you can make it. But if you add too much of that, you'll get lost into wonderful magic realism, nobody can understand. Most SF authors are old fashioned, meat-and-potatoes, simple writers, telling very complex, wierd stories.

HL - So you do understand the common dispise of SF?

DS - A lot of people who hates SF never read it, they've seen a lot of SF movies, Star Trek, that sort of fascist futures that tv SF tends to love. They ain't got any idea of where literary SF have evolved. And when you remind them of the novel 1984 and Brave New World, they call it serious mainstream.

HL - Perhaps, as Aldiss claims, it is also the question about SF as an American product. In Europe, American SF is considered notorious militaristic. I think of all the nuclear wars followed by terror regimes, by US writers, while English post apocalyptic SF is focused mainly on getting along after natural catastrophes. However different, I did see militaristic motives repeatedly in your books too - political conflicts, taking place far from the native country: The Cuban activities in The Crooc Factory, and the space wars in the Hyperion books. They never cease to remind me of real CIA operations, the Falkland War and so forth.

DS - Well, you can quote me for my surprise. I never had that question before. But what can I say but, you are completely right.

Simmons' World

HL - Now I'd like to talk a bit more about your writing. With your new book, The Crooc Factory, you have committed a curious, biographical and literary agent novel. Before that, among others, you wrote the four volume Hyperion SF epic. Immedeately one would recognize your broadness. But there aren't appearing many every-day people in your books, and when they do, the play minor roles. It seems to me, as if you prefer the exotic aspects of human nature. Hemingway's 'spies' are whores, beggars, bartenders, and outcasts. The pilgrims in your Hyperion books are poets, priests, and soldiers.

DS - My response to that is: Guilty. My SF follows the SF habit of not being about the every-day middle class person, but about prophets and generals and popes, and other world historical individuals. But that is part of playing by the rules of space opera, which is my way of looking at the Hyperion books. In other books, such as The Crook Factory, my Hemingway novel, I think it's fair to say, that Hemingway tended to shine that light on the people he dragged into his surroundings, his excitement, his involvement. Deep sea fishing, bull fighting, safaris, or espionage - whatever his play, whatever adventure he was on, he swept people into it, friends of friends, even ordinary people. And so they became very special. It is interesting to note how his almost mythological status tended rub off onto his surroundings. It made everyone agree with a mythical statue.

HL - Then again, Hemingway's own fictional characters are not epecially exotic.

DS - Oh no! It's about working class people, but were elevated in a way that were otherwise unheard of in literature. He prefered to write about the under-dog and the poor guy being ground down by the capitalist and so forth. While he was a capialist himself, he critizised capitalism and his works fit into the left wing American scool of writing. He didn't make one day of honest labour during the 1930'ies' depression. That's why his FBI files were so fat and rich. They became suspicious on him early on, for his writing to the new masses and so forth. But even though he just wrote about rum-runner sailors, they were extraordinary. They just got ground down by brute forces.

HL - There are other exotic touches as well. In the Hyperion books, you describe a kind of religious endeavour, oddly initiated by the complete contrast to religion. Science and its offspring, the artificial intelligences, has set out to rediscover or recreate God. It seems easy to associate the motive to the lack of spiritual fundament in our times, and the new age buffet of more or less homecooked pseudo scientific and pseudo religious dishes. But compared to other motives - the third power described in Keats' poem for example - I came to think of the alchemists. The goal of their research, a transformation of the alchemists themselves, is perhaps also the goal of modern science?

DS - The question about the mysticism underlying science is an adequate and valid question. Many readers and revievers just don't see it, doesn't know if the books are anti-christian, pro-christian, theological new age, metaphysical. But scientists tend to like them. I have a lot of female well-educated readers in Russia, Brazil and so forth. The ideas are important to them.

Essentially I feel that science takes over the dialogue that theology, philosophy, and other humanistic disciplines had for so many centuries. Every central issue of humanity is really being explored now by science. And my feeling is, that here, at the end of the 20. century, post quantum-mechanic science, the complexity theories being applied to biological populations, fractals, smoke and cloud formation, has penetrated deeply into the spiritual aspect of our response to the universe.

My scientist friends are appalled of the idea of any mystical qualities in science, for you can't do real science and play mysticism. If you do, you'll intimidate coherent thinking. They do their science, but are dealing with the quintessential questions of who are we, humans, and what goals mankind should have. There is someting in our human lives who actually resonates on cosmic scales. And when you look at quantum physics, the answer is yes, there is someting woven into the entire universe unit. We just don't understand it yet. My final comment on it is that the greatest mystical aspect, probably, for science right now is, that at the beginning of the 21. century we are essentially were we were in 1899, looking at physics, and the entire structure of the atom was beginning to be understood. They all went into the idea of converting mass to energy on a crude scale.

It looked like a wonderful century of research ahead. Of course, what it led to the atomic bomb and a lot of nastiness as well. And certainly the same will be true in genetics. The differece is, that when a species takes control of its own evolution, it has to be on profound treshold, in the life of that species. It is no walk in the park to become something else. In that sense it is a mystical cord being quad in my Hyperion books, but there is no advocacy for any special mystical, or spiritual, or new age religion.

Uncertain truth

HL - What made me think about it, was that the world picture of self correcting science, traditionally at least, was in opposition to the normative religious systems. Is it no longer the case?

DS - Yes it is, in the terms they think of science, the way they practise, and the fact that they're willing to say they're wrong. I know scientist who had their life work wiped out by a single picture coming in from the Hubble telescope, because their theory was wrong. One cosmologist was an advocate for the eternally expanding universe. When that was shown not to be the case, because of the invisible matter, he said: "Well, it's just too bad that God didn't see that." He was being ironic. "Because it is much, much prettier than the universe as it really exists. We just have to accept that the universe is attributable to failure."

HL - Yes. Recently two independant research teams discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating? Its an argue against every accepted theory.

DS - I'm convinced that all of the great theories of the 20. century will be proven to be false. And that is disturbing, as many of the theories of this century are very pro-human. In USA the utilitarian sense that all people are equal is very strong, and is the rule within politic. I think that in fifteen years, when the human genome for intellect, violent behavior, and so forth, are known and we have a choice of fixing them, it's gonna challenge the basis of American politic. The National Science Foundation voted 63 to one against looking into the genetic origin for intelligence. That's science being cowardly, and anti-American.

HL - It is interesting, as a lot of research into consciousness are carried out these days. Consciousness is a colossal mystery. Everybody knows that it exist, yet we don't know much about it. It is not belived to exist in the physical world. On the other hand, it also seem unrelated to information processes. We do not experience colours as abstract wavelength data. They are qualities.

DS - Yes. We're coming almost full circle with the idea of the Greeks, that we're interacting with the universe, and we bring something to it. One of the first philosophical statements that kids deal with is: Do they see the same colors as everybody else. That enters a big breakthrough. I remember reading the original research material on the creation of the polaroid camera, and the work with the dyes for instant cameras. It was discovered, that certain colors did'nt exist on the visible wave lenght. The human minds of the percievers are coming to conclusions on the existence of these colors. They had to fake to get them into the color dyes, allowing us to see them in the pictures. And - you're right - colors are qualities for consciousness. That particular discovery destroys all of our metaphors for consciousness, because all of our metaphors one way or the other comes down to the mind of the computer - if it's analog or digital.

My book The Hollow Man elaborates on, that human consciousness is not about information. Not anymore than a book is about information. In a wonderfull essay the American poet writer and philosopher William Gass points out, that we're deluted these days of the internet, into thinking that books are about data. Data are like a drug. If you take enough of it, you feel involunerable, and everything in your life turns into search for more information. But a book isn't information. A dictionary is, and perhaps a computer. But the book, the created book, is much greater than the sum of the data parts it contains.

HL - It is also a day-dream.

That particular discovery destroys all of our metaphors for consciousness, because all of our metaphors one way or the other comes down to the mind of the computer, the mind if like this or that, something, if it's analog or digital

HL - It has a potential for day-dreams, arising in the mind of the reader.

DS - YES! That's my exact instinct about conscioussness. It seems thar conscioussness has something to do with the standing wave front, like reality at quantum level. Conscioussness seems vowen into the wave front universe. If I go on like this, I'll end up sounding like a new age philosopher. But I guess we can get a glimpse of what conscioussness is about in some years. And I believe its going to be absolutely shocking.

HL - While intelligence, perhaps, is about information processes, it has nothing to do with consciousness?

DS - I don't think we will have intelligence separate from the perception qualities you're talking about. I agree with others, that the best way to create artificial intelligence, is to give it a body and make interact with the surroundings. A disembodied consciousness would end up as a moron.

Melting views of the world

At this moment the editor shoved up. Our time was out. I asked for just one more, short question. Just one.

HL - Well, we drifted away from SF and your writing, so I'll try to squeeze it back into the discussion ... A common motive in much of the recent SF, also here in Denmark, is the simulated every-day, with a hidden agenda covering for another, tough reality. You are also describing minds, so interconnected through cyberspace, they almost come together to one. But still, it differs a lot from the hiveminds in, say, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End or Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers. What is it about, really?

DS - I think the question almost answers itself. You used the terme "hivemind", thus you talked about the internet, the global web, a communication way, where everything come together and interrelates without central control. It simply is a large amorphus organism, agreeing with communication protocols. Nobody that ever wrote SF about hiveminds and evolution towards some sort of out-of-body existence, ever considered that we'd do it by the end of 20. century, simply by getting all new phone lines and connect them to computers.

Even friends of mine, like Bruce Sterling, who gave os a sense of geography of cyberspace. That was a conceptual breakthrough in the sense, it let us all know information as a place you can go. That is the great thruth about the internet. It is somewhere else. Still a shaddowed, dark place, filled with strange things, certainly. But from there to understand the unifying power of the internet ... I think, we still don't comprehend all the properties of internet, a sense of the evolutionary steps it takes.

In my books I take up the issue from a more a classic space opera look at intelligence, becoming a collective. And both of us are writers ... As a creative person, and as an American, quite honestly, I hate the idea of collective consiousness.

HL - I thought so - what I tried to hint at was precisely the fact that hiveminds were once metaphors for ideological repression, fear of communism. But at that time, the threats came from the outside. Now it has become an internal matter. In a movie like The Matrix by the Wachowski brothers, oozes of hidden agendas, although we ourselves created the system, and are part of it.

DS - That's an unusual sharp observation. And again you are right. In early Matrix stories the villains were aliens, the government, or some other opressive, external reality. Even in the case of Philip K. Dick. I think Dick was one of the few American SF writers whom the academics af America loved, because he always blurred the boundaries between reality and personal experience.

The walls began rotting away, and the main character - the reader - realized that everything he had believed about his world was made up - a concensual hallucination. I love the early phrase of Gibson, when he was just creating the concept of cyberspace, while the web was actually being woven in the physical world, the electronic world. He talked about the cyberspace as being a concensual hallucination, and that is truly what it is, even now, when the majority doesn't have VR individually, and computers are crude, like watching television in 1937, on a black and white three inch screen.

But, as you say, it was always the government or somebody else digging into and manipulating the mind, and always trying to repress. Now we're creating our own hallucination, a really exciting aspect of the internet, where the average person now, is learning what actors have always known: that it is sanity saving to be someone else for a while. That having a person in a hypermind can be very exhilarating, can be dangerous. Not being known, not being seen in person, being without references, and still be able to communicate, will dependently be more and more important to people. So, you're right. We've met the enemy, and they're us. If we screw this up, we're the ones with the problem, not them. We are our own hidden agenda. That's coming out of human nature.

HL - So you think, it got something to do with the internet, and the way we interrelates?

DS - That's the great, unifying quantum leap happening, that nobody really dig into. In the beginning of the 20. century everybody talked about the dissolving of individual nations leading towards one global government. Even after Word War II, everybody talks about the United States of Europe. We're more nations now than ever before. The nations are breaking up into tribal groups, and the tribal groups are breaking up into clans. Languages and ethnic groups are demanding autonomy everywhere. It is the opposite of the prediction towards centralisation.

HL - What Gibson talks about - concensus hallucination - is not just another word for culture?

DS - It is, but you know, so much culture are inherented and necessary. And in connection to SF ... I don't know. What about youself?

HL - Are you the one asking questions now?

DS - You write SF yourself, so why not?

HL - Okay ... In my opinion, metaphors appears and disappears, or alters its relevance, following the changes of society. Gradually - as we come closer, across cultural barriers - we are facing the thinking of each other, agreeing on new, common concepts. I do believe, that everybody hears the music, even though only a few are aware of it. If you are not, the music becomes a source of fear, which partially may explain the status of SF. Touring from one concept to another undermines our ability to orientate and identify ourselves, in private as well as a nation. The fear of being taken over by the incomprehensible, the alien, is largely misused in obscure agendas, and triggers a variety of counter reactions - perhaps even the splitting into tribes, you mentioned.

A society can turn towards individualism in periods, like in USA, or towards community, like in China, while Europe is a bit more mixed at the moment. Whatever preference, mankind has at all times been paradoxical, at once individuals and part of a common culture - they are nothing without each other. It reminds one of Joyce Carol Oates' wonderfull text: "I dream of a world where you can go in and out of bodies, changing your soul, everything changing and not fixed forever, becoming men and women, daughters, children again, even old people, feeling how it is to be them and then not hating them ..."

Dan Simmons nodded. Somebody coughed slightly at the open door, and we looked at the editor in fron of the impatient journalists. The time schedule was exceeded by far. Then Simmons turned his wise face towards mine, sending an eloquent look. A sign of mutual understanding ... All the things we had to discuss at a later occation.

* * *

Outside the interview

DS - I've enjoyed meeting the old line of SF writers, like Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov. And one thing they have in common: They all hate that sort of unreliable technolgy. They won't fly, they never had a television set until the moon landing.

HL - They won't even fly?

DS - Bradbury won't fly at all. Bradbury has never even learned how to drive. He had to hire a chauffeur to drive him.

HL - What ... Does he sail to Europe?

DS - Well, I did. I took the QE2 a couple of years ago. Every time I fly over here, I wish there were Zeppeliners still around. I look forward, hoping we will have them again.

HL - Hanging up there, cut the engines and open the windows, to hear the ocean roar. Perhaps a little fishing. That would be great.

DS - About Asimov ... I guess he is tranquilised and put aboard as luggage.

HL - Did you know that the Germans had about 4000 airships during World War II. They used them for troop transports to Africa. And they actually flew about 300 km/h.

DS - Wow ... One of my passions is abandoned technology, wich we should newer have abandoned. Certainly, it's the most amazing things who came out of the 20. century. Came and went, like the Zeppeliners, some of the giant subs and so forth. And I want to see them again. I love old-fashion technology.