The Neverending Interview (Jan 96 -
??)
Last updated 11/2003
About the Predator novel Forever
Midnight and
Aliens novel Steel Egg:"I was allowed to innovate, to create new backstory, to
describe their culture and their home planet, all things that were forbidden to
do before. Who could resist having a free reign to do that?"
Podcast in three parts
Podcast with Rick Kleffel on Living Shadows and
The Other End
"So -- what if you could create your OWN end-times, your own Judgment Day? What
would you create? This is mine. It isn't God, per se, and definitely not aliens,
behind it all, but it is a kind of Judgment Day--a Judgment Day that the left,
instead of the right-wing, might envision."
Weird Tales Issue #342, October 2006 (John Shirley Featured Author)
"I do
have plans to record
new material
and am thinking of putting together a band to be called The Screamin' Geezers.
The demographic
is there! The older rockers will take back the stages . . . with their 'axes' in
hand!"
"In a general thematic sense and in
some specifics, my novels Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra and Eclipse Corona
were pretty accurate and IÕm afraid are becoming more so every year."
Podcast with RU Sirius mostly on The Other End
"I grew up reading [science fiction]. The real world is a pretty awful place,
in many ways . . . fantastic worlds are preferable."
Podcast with Rock Kleffel
"I did the first print interview with Kiss ever and one of them fucked my girlfriend, as she stayed behind after the interview! I think he gave me the clap through her. . ."
"My work has characteristics -- e.g., it tends to be somewhat didactic, message
oriented,
to greater or lesser extents. To a fault, I'm sure. But I don't think it has a
genre."
"There is such a thing as an authentic rebel. Anything can be twisted, distorted, entropically
subsumed to become its own opposite--and inevitably will become its
own opposite without fresh infusions of energy....The original impulses
decay along the way. But that energy that led to the great ideas of
freedom, to unreserved self expression in art, to spiritual
renaissance--that intelligent, insistent energy always returns."
"Ich las Bücher durch Jack Vance, ich
bin addicted nach ihm."
"Labels only confuse people. The smarter people recognize artists who
transcend categories. But I always try to entertain. It's in my
nature; writers are born to entertain. If that means working
ostensibly within a genre, fine."
"I think paranoia can be instructive in the right doses. Paranoia is a
skill."
"Germany will have to open its arms to me so that I can leap
into them and sink my teeth in the first soft spot I can find..."
"Truth is beyond category, energy chooses its own category, thunder
rings where it will, and pigeonholers can kiss my...pigeonhole."
"I am more conservative now, in some ways -- but I'm not a
conservative. I'm just in favor of order (intelligent and tolerant
order though) over chaos now. I think this is wisdom and not
decay."
An extensive biographical interview
"Sometimes my
writing is too over the top, too visceral, too bombastic. Where
would culture be without grand guignol to kick around; without the
excesses of Baudelaire and Dali and Alfred Jarry and Genet and Francis
Bacon; without the ranting vision of Celine; without Iggy Pop and the
Sex Pistols and Little Richard? I'm not always over the top, not at
all. But if I am sometimes, that doesn't mean I'm Spinal Tap; I don't
imagine that the volume knob should go to 11."
R.U. Sirius talks to John Shirley about the aliens, McDonald's
commercials, and some possible paths to enlightenment.
"I'm trying to trick people into thinking about the unthinkable by
using pop culture images."
