Subconscious of Our Times: John Shirley in Conversation with R.U. Sirius
From a longer interview published in 21C Magazine, early 1997
John Shirley is different. A rock'n'roller -- he's been in several bands and writes lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult -- he isn't another affectless cyberwriter looking at hi-tech low life from a safely ironic distance. Shirley has been on the streets. He's lived the life. He's been strung out. He's the real thing. And he feels.
Not to be tugging on your heartstrings -- Shirley writes some of the darkest humor extant. His New Noir short-story collection, for instance, features bleak, hopeless and horrifying white-trash stories, but the tears on your cheeks will be from laughter. And he's versatile. He does horror, dark humor, moral cyberpunk fiction about fighting fascism in the future, Hollywood screenplays and even TV scripts.
His career as a punk started in high school in Salem, Oregon, where he was expelled for keeping a teacher locked in a closet while he lectured the class on what a nuclear war would be like. He's been raising Cain ever since.
While his biggest commercial claim is as scriptwriter for The Crow, and for TV episodes of Deep Space Nine and VR5, sci-fi fans are likely to be familiar with tooth-grinding novels like Eclipse Penumbra, Transmaniacon and Heatseeker.
His most recent book, Silicon Embrace, is a bit different. Reflective, philosophical, possibly even mystical, it's perhaps the work of a man happily married -- but don't let that throw you. Shirley has really wrapped his head around the 90s Zeitgeist, producing a novel about alien invasions, militias, media pirates and government conspiracy, as a backdrop for deeper reflections on the nature of 'God' and (hu)man. It may well be his best novel to date. The satire is still wicked, there's enough violence to keep the freaks satisfied, and you can gain some hard-won insights from Mr Shirley in the process.
This interview took place in an all-too-noisy Thai restaurant in North Berkeley, California. On the way home, Shirley said, "Let's listen to some roots music," and put on The Ramones Live.
R.U. Sirius: Your work over the years has been a sort of odd combination of horror, fantasy and an expression of radical political morality, It's an odd juxtaposition. Is there a line of thought that unities all of these things?
John Shirley: I look for different types of symbols to create the metaphor for the statement I want to make, and fantasy images are so malleable. You can make a symbol pop up against any kind of scenario and make it seem reasonable, as long as you can get the reader to accept the ground rules. My original intention, when I first started writing, was to interpret the world the way the Surrealists did: to get into those places where the conscious world -- the physical world -- and the unconscious world come together. To make people see the fantastic in the mundane. I found that science fiction was one field, as long as you accepted the basic ground rules, that was open to everything. But I could be just as happy writing a spy novel. As long as it included everything necessary to make the statement I wanted to make.
RU: Do you make a distinction between what is the product of the unconscious
and what might be a part of an objective but invisible reality?
JS: I increasingly make a distinction. Most of it is a mental phenomenon -- a
combination of projections -- the sort of Joseph Campbell process -- whatever
Joseph Campbell process goes on in your particular culture. That's all a mental
process but a lot of people mistake it for a supernatural metaphysical process.
But I'm convinced that there's an invisible universe that has a metaphysical
reality that we sometimes apprehend in ways that we can't describe in ordinary
language. So we use inadequate symbols to describe it and in this way we
muddle the metaphysical universe with all the claptrap and accessories of our
subconscious.
RU: Much of your new novel Silicon Embrace seems to be a parody of the
zeitgeist -- where the public subconscious is right now. There's the conspiratorial,
X-Files type thing, and there's even a sort of new age tinge to some of it. In
public statements, you've been very critical of the whole new age mentality.
What distinctions do you make between authentic and bullshit metaphysics?
Were you trying to show some of that in this book?
JS: Yeah. You notice that I ridicule things like channelers in the novel. I take
some of those ideas that are in the air and play with them, expose them, bring
them out in the open. And if there's any truth in it, try to define what that could
be, and strip away the rest of it. And some of my discussion of this in the novel
uses a symbol that for me is purely metaphorical -- the grey alien versus a kind
of supernatural alien. The gray aliens are just a metaphor for a human state of
mind. I also play with some ideas that are bubbling up on the Internet. For
instance the idea that all of the UFO imagery and ET imagery and ideas used by
Star Trek were planted into our culture either by people who are preparing us
for ET's or by the ET's themselves. This isn't something I literally believe. But
I play with it to draw attention to the symbols and ideas that are buried in pop
culture. We can take these things as sort of a Disneyland ride or we can parse
them -- take them apart and find the pearl that's inside the nasty little oyster of
the idea. I try to use the familiarity of these ideas to sort of backtrack through
the pop culture trope, back to the actual unconscious apprehension of what the
idea really meant. I'm trying to trick people into thinking about the unthinkable
by using pop culture images.
RU: Didn't the Gray Alien, Jaron (snicker), get pissed off about the Star Trek
references?
JS: The gray alien was pissed off about the alien autopsy film. I said what I
actually think about the alien autopsy film. I think it's funded by a government
agency for disinformation purposes. What they're trying to do -- what they're
trying to distract us from -- I'm not sure.
. . .
RU: In Silicon Embrace, the meta seemed almost like the perfect new age
dream of the cosmic savior that heals us and sets things right.
JS: What they did in the book was close the wound that the gray aliens had
opened in us. But they still left us to our own devices. Ultimately the message
was that you're thrown back on your own resources to try to become more
conscious. Because only by becoming more conscious can you rise up against the
automatic reactions that make us automatons. The meta are a metaphor too. I
was aware that they were something of a new age symbol.
There again, it was a matter of using a pop cultural symbol in order to draw
somebody into the heart of an idea. And hopefully, I'll get them to engage the
idea and take it the next step into something much more interesting than
benevolent ETs -- or in the case of the meta -- benevolent interdimensional entities.
I do think that if we are being visited by aliens, it's equally likely that they're
from other dimensions of reality, or higher planes, or they're time travelers.
It's just as likely as the extraterrestrial explanation.
By the way, I started working on this several years ago, and then had to stop to
work on scripts. But I started before this whole wave of UFO hysteria hit . . .
before The X Files...way before Independence Day.
But then, as I wrote the book I incorporated some of those references so it
would resonate with people's pop cultural template. I try to take a banal pop
cultural symbol and then connect it with another one and another one. And then
the original trappings of the pop culture fall away and, in what's left I've
hopefully tinkered together a more interesting idea. Aside from the obvious
satiric aspect of it.
RU: Were the militias a major factor in the world already by the time you
started writing about them. Had the Oklahoma City bombing happened yet?
JS: Yeah, by the time I was writing that part of the book, that had already
happened. it fit into my original scenario. I wanted to write about a new
America civil war. I first started thinking about that eight years ago. I didn't
want to just do another post-holocaust kind of scene. I wanted to come up with a
schismed schizy United States. As the militias came up, it reinforced the whole
context. So the backdrop of this book is a second American civil war slightly in
the future. It creates a crises that generates the government attempt to use the
ET phenomena to unite the country.
. . .
RU: The Crow has become a sort of goth cult thing.
JS: Well, it's a goth movie. It's goth image. Goth is tragic romance and The
Crow is tragic romance. All teenagers feel tragic at some point. They all yearn
for romance. They go through this period when they realize that this is what
life is and this is what's coming and these are my limitations and this is the
person that I've found that I must be. The struggle with accepting what they are.
And they have a tragic sense of being who they are and of being satisfied with
it. Other people won't let them be satisfied with it.
RU: You were talking about some of the young rockers and how
self-consciously they manipulate street cred. And I'm thinking about how well
advertising itself does that now. The speed of coöptation has accelerated to an
incredible degree to the point where you'll get like a black neo-beat spoken
word poet in a McDonald's commercial almost the second it becomes a trend.
Now, some of your stuff is really extreme. For instance, some of the stuff in
New Noir. There's the piece where this guy is getting head and the girl dies
and he winds up with her head on his dick. Can you ever imagine that stuff
becoming cooptable? That something on that level could become comfortable
entertainment?
JS: Not in the near future. That's one of the reasons I sometimes write extreme
stuff, just so it can't get coopted. What happens in that story, by the way, is this
guy is shooting speed while she's giving him head. And she chokes to death and
he doesn't realize it. And there's this sort of rictus effect and she gets trapped on
his genitals. And so the only way he can remain mobile is by cutting off her
head. So then he's going around with her head on his genitals. I don't know. It
might have something to do with my having been divorced five times (laughter).
I'm sure it's highly politically incorrect.
RU: So there's a strain of misogyny in there?
JS: I think all men... it's sort of like being a Vietnam vet. I wasn't in Vietnam,
but I understand that they have a post-traumatic stress thing that happens . And
coming out of relationships with women, there's also a post-traumatic
syndrome. I think it goes both ways. Women have the same thing. Women are
misanthro... whatever the female equivalent of misogynist is. It's not quite
misanthropy...
RU: I think that literally, that's what it is. (With mock piety) Which just shows
how damned sexist the language is...
JS: Appalling. Anyway, your original question... all the people in advertising and media... they
were doing acid twenty years ago so they're much more flexible about these
kinds of arty protest roles. It's easy for them to visualize making those things
mainstream. But what happens is that instead of making those things
mainstream, they've only mainstreamed the images, and mainstreamed
themselves. They've made themselves impotent.
RU: In the process, perhaps even making subculturism itself impotent?
JS: Well, there's always going to be new reactions. I mean, a subculture is by its
nature reactive, which is one of its limitations. If you're always reacting, you're
limited in how much insight you can have, and how much objectivity and how
conscious you can be. Usually, when you're reactive, you're a little bit less
conscious than you might otherwise be. But sometimes it's valuable to be
consciously reactive or rebellious. There'll always be those currents. They
perform a useful social function.
The fringe becomes the mainstream sometimes. Even where it doesn't become
the mainstream, the social organism feeds from the fringe in some way. It's like
a starfish. You have these weird little tendrils on the exterior of its body that
takes in little bits of things and eventually it metabolizes the little pieces into the
heart. The social organism is almost that cohesive and organic. It's horrible to
contemplate sometimes how much like little cells in this amorphous social
organism we are. But when you're in a high place looking down on the
corpuscular movement of cars down the arteries of the freeway, the analogy
can't be missed.
RU: What about the possibility that the cooptation of all these hipster themes by
advertising could be another part of that MK ULTRA social control
brainwashing experiment you were talking of earlier?
JS: Well, I don't think they've got it that together in the intelligence circles.
RU: Who does it really sell to when they put Burroughs in a Nike commercial
or I once saw a commercial for Goodyear tires that used the first minute of
"Venus In Furs" by the Velvet Underground (laughter).
JS: No! Well, I was glad that there was that commercial that used "Search and
Destroy." Iggy deserves to be rich. But those Nike people deserve to be jailed.
Not for their offensively patronizing commercials but because they and Adidas
and Spaulding have their manufacturing jobbed out to overseas sweatshops
staffed by children. And in certain countries the children are sometimes
abducted to these sweatshops. These kids have no schooling, no contact with
their parents, and they're often beaten into high production. Then we wear the
tennis shoes that these kids make before they die of despair. They're starved too.
You know, we take part in that every time we buy a product that knowingly
uses sweatshop labor from overseas. I think it should be strictly against the law.
I'll tell you what I think. For years, I struggled with the basic political
issue -- which is the individual versus the state. On the one hand you need to be
part of this great organism because it feeds you too, it nourishes you too, it
protect you too, and it protects a lot of innocents. On the other hand, one is
digested and coöpted and you lose individual freedom. And while I object to
knee-jerk libertarianism because it doesn't take into consideration the many
things that need to be regulated like environmental laws, I'm beginning to feel
that there's too much damn restriction on us. We're being strangled. I've come
to the conclusion that we need to maximize freedom by having a few
fundamental rules that are universal, fixed and absolute. These fundamental
rules would make freedom really possible. And those rules are basically the
rules of human rights and the rules of environmental rights -- it should be
absolutely illegal to pollute on any kind of a large scale anywhere. And to make
that a rule is to restrict somebody's freedom. But there are some areas where
freedom needs to be restricted. It should be globally illegal for one country to
invade another or to use military force in the engagement of an atrocity as in
Bosnia and Rwanda. The rules against those things need to be much more
strictly enforced. But once those fundamental rules are in place -- everything else
should be nobody's business at all. So, even though -- in a sense it would be
trampling on somebody's sensitivities for you to screw your girlfriend on the
sidewalk, they couldn't stop you...
RU: How could they?
JS: Right (laughter). How could they . . . but that would be outside the scope of
the fundamental laws, the laws of human rights, environmental protection,
reasonable wages, and reasonably safe working conditions.
RU:What's the Big Idea?
JS: Silicon Embrace is a transitional book for me between
cyberpunk -- incorporating cyberpunk -- but it's an attempt to build a bridge to a
sort of greater awakeness to life. It's a bridge to metaphysical, philosophical
issues. It goes from the specific of an individual man's struggle in a cyberpunk
story to the big issues of why we're alive, what's the point of life, and where do
we go from here?
RU: The end got very didactic.
JS: Yeah, I was trying to bring people in whatever way I could -- narrative,
humor, satire, fun with conspiracy and paranoia, social issues, to draw them
into what seem to me to be the higher questions. I think some of the greatest
satirists did just that. Jonathan Swift did that. And Kurt Vonnegut. It's
something to aspire to.
(© 1997 21C Magazine)
