Q: Are you ready to write about Australia?
Dann: I’m getting ready. I think there can be a rather long period of gestation between experiencing traumatic, life-changing experiences and writing about them. I wrote a story called “Jubilee,” which was one of the first on-line stories. That was when Omni was testing the, er, aether with Neon Visions. That story is in my new collection called...Jubilee. Part of that story takes place in the States and in Greece, because I had been in Greece just before I wrote it, and part takes place in Melbourne. I think I am beginning to see the Australian culture now and what aspects I’m interested in writing about. So it may happen in the next couple of years.
Q: Getting back to science fiction, wouldn’t this kind of perspective better equip you to write about another planet?
Dann: [Laughs.] When I was working on The Memory Cathedral, the idea came to me of history being a different place, a dislocation....I was on a number of panels here [at the World Fantasy Con in Corpus Christi] and I was listening to a number of people asking questions about myth and about how stories worked in the past, and we were all assuming that the mindset in the past was the same as the mindset now. I feel that people in the Renaissance had a completely different mindset, a different sensorium. They perceived things differently.
Most novels about space-travel don’t talk about the tremendous, hollow alienation that is a consequence of being away from everything familiar. You feel this distance toward everything. When I moved to Australia, when I started living in a different culture, even though it’s an English-speaking culture, I viscerally felt that dislocation. So, yes, I expect I’ll try to write about that in the future. I want to write about never being able to go home again in ways that maybe haven’t been done a lot in the genre. Fool that I am, I suppose I want to write the great American novel. [Laughs.]
Q: You could take your experiences and then make up another planet, and deal with the sense of dislocation far more convincingly than could a writer who has never been out of New Jersey.
Dann: Being a science fiction writer gave me a leg up when I tried to write about the past. It was a question of extrapolating backwards! The alieness of the past fascinates me, and I tried to recreate that alien world called the Renaissance in The Memory Cathedral, just as I tried to recreate another alien world, that of the American Civil War with The Silent.
But, to answer your question, which I keep dancing around, yes, it would be interesting to write about science fictional alien cultures as I did with, say, a novel like Starhiker, but with my own experience behind it.
Q: I would also imagine, by way of perspective, that your view on science fiction now is very different from what it was when you started out. Surely you are now writing things which you would never have imagined yourself writing, back at the beginning of your career in the early ’70s.
Dann: I have become a completely different writer, but part of that is just growing as a writer and, dare I say it, as a person.
When I was flying over here, we stopped in Sydney, because I had to give a lecture about Leonardo da Vinci at the Powerhouse Museum—they had the Gates Codex on exhibition. Later on, I bumped into a friend at the Sydney airport whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years. She used to have a bookstore in my hometown, and she was visiting Australia. She had known me from the time I was fifteen and was one of the people who had guided me toward books and educated me. To paraphrase what Gene Wolfe once said about Damon Knight, she grew me from a bean. So there I was chatting about my career and talking about Hong Kong being one of my favorite places, and how I wouldn’t be making it back this year...blah-blah-blah.... And she said, “Listen to yourself. Did you ever think way back then that you would be living as you’re living now?”
No, I could never have called it....
One of the things that I think has happened since I have been in Australia, which I am proud of, is the effect that Dreaming Down-Under, the anthology I edited with Janeen Webb, has had on genre publishing in Australia. When Harlan Ellison visited Sydney a few years ago for a conference, he said, “You know, you guys are having your golden age right now.” He’d touched a nerve. There was a real zeitgeist going on. Writers were starting to talk to one another, and there was a lot of excitement. Our Dreaming anthology became a sort of focus, a showcase for that excitement.
It has been wonderful to see these writers starting to publish in the United States and in Europe. I acted as a facilitator for a lot of people in the early days. They didn’t have a sense of how American publishing worked, so I was acting as a de facto agent. It was a real kick because I could see the effect on the industry, and it was lovely, positive stuff.
Q: Are you going to do another Dreaming Down-Under?
Dann: I wasn’t going to do another anthology like Dreaming unless something really big came along. People kept asking, “Why don’t you do another volume?” I kept saying, “No, another volume in maybe five years.” But Dreaming was like Dangerous Visions. It had that same effect in Australia. Janeen and I wanted to wait until new people came up before editing another Dreaming Down-Under. We didn’t want to edit another volume prematurely just because the first anthology worked commercially. Then Ramsey Campbell and Dennis Etchison approached me with an idea for an international horror anthology, using really powerful writers, putting the bar very high. Dennis would edit the American portion. Ramsey would edit the British portion, and I would do the Australian. So we would cover a good portion of the English-speaking horror genre. The idea was that it had to come out simultaneously in the US, Great Britain, and Australia. Tor is doing it in the US, and HarperCollins will publish it in the Australia and Great Britain. The anthology will be called Gathering the Bones, or maybe just Bones; we’re not sure yet. It’s another one of those big projects editor/writers do out of love.
Q: You must have a better sense of this than most editors. What differences in approach do the Australians have toward fantasy or horror?
Dann: That’s a difficult question. It was interesting to see the American reviews of Dreaming, which were very good. Again we were lucky. But reviewers seemed to think that Australian fiction would be about place. In other words, Australian geography would be the great influence. There are stories in which geography is very important, but I don’t think that is at base where the difference lies. I think it’s in the language and culture. You could almost say that Australian English is built on irony. I often tell tourists that all Australians know about ten thousand jokes and anecdotes. When they’re chatting with you, they’ll use these anecdotes and bits of wonderful irony, but they’ll only tell you the punch line. You’re supposed to know the rest to ‘get it’.
Australian English sounds like the same language we use in America, but I often find that when I’m just having conversations with my wife, who is Australian, that we can think that we’re saying the same thing, yet we’re misunderstanding each other because the words don’t mean the same thing.
I think, however, that in the genres there is a commonality that runs among English-speaking writers. In, say, science fiction, in the States, in England, and in Australia it’s not the place that makes the profound difference, because I think we’re all dipping into the same wells. We’re all cross-fertilizing each other. There is that difference of perspective and geography which every once in a while makes you say, “Ah....” But I think it’s the quality of the work that is important, and the fact that a given location has a number of writers who are doing really interesting work. If you look at the stories in Dreaming, you wouldn’t necessarily look at them and say, “These are Australian.” You might look at them and say that this or that story is wonderful.
Q: I’d think that the one thing the Australians would have in common with the Americans is a sense of frontier or at least a memory of a frontier. You go to Britain and you get the